A Wizard of Earthsea 
Ursula K. LeGuin 
1968 
Only in silence the word, 
only in dark the light, 
only in dying life: 
bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky. 
-The Creation of Ea 
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1 Warriors in the Mist 
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The Island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast 
Sea, is a land famous for wizards. From the towns in its high valleys and the ports on its dark narrow 
bays many a Gontishman has gone forth to serve the Lords of the Archipelago in their cities as wizard or 
mage, or, looking for adventure, to wander working magic from isle to isle of all Earthsea. Of these 
some say the greatest, and surely the greatest voyager, was the man called Sparrowhawk, who in his day 
became both dragonlord and Archmage. His life is told of in the Deed of Ged and in many songs, but 
this is a tale of the time before his fame, before the songs were made. 
He was born in a lonely village called Ten Alders, high on the mountain at the head of the 
Northward Vale. Below the village the pastures and plowlands of the Vale slope downward level below 
level towards the sea, and other towns lie on the bends of the River Ar; above the village only forest 
rises ridge behind ridge to the stone and snow of the heights. 
The name he bore as a child, Duny, was given him by his mother, and that and his life were all she 
could give him, for she died before he was a year old. His father, the bronze-smith of the village, was a 
grim unspeaking man, and since Duny's six brothers were older than he by many years and went one by 
one from home to farm the land or sail the sea or work as smith in other towns of the Northward Vale, 
there was no one to bring the child up in tenderness. He grew wild, a thriving weed, a tall, quick boy, 
loud and proud and full of temper. With the few other children of the village he herded goats on the 
steep meadows above the riversprings; and when he was strong enough to push and pull the long 
bellows-sleeves, his father made him work as smith's boy, at a high cost in blows and whippings. There 
was not much work to be got out of Duny. He was always off and away; roaming deep in the forest, 
swimming in the pools of the River Ar that like all Gontish rivers runs very quick and cold, or climbing 
by cliff and scarp to the heights above the forest, from which he could see the sea, that broad northern 
ocean where, past Perregal, no islands are. 

 A sister of his dead mother lived in the village. She had done what was needful for him as a baby, 
but she had business of her own and once he could look after himself at all she paid no more heed to 
him. But one day when the boy was seven years old, untaught and knowing nothing of the arts and 
powers that are in the world, he heard his aunt crying out words to a goat which had jumped up onto the 
thatch of a hut and would not come down: but it came jumping when she cried a certain rhyme to it. 
Next day herding the longhaired goats on the meadows of High Fall, Duny shouted to them the words he 
had heard, not knowing their use or meaning or what kind of words they were: 
Noth hierth malk man 
hiolk han merth han! 
He yelled the rhyme aloud, and the goats came to him. They came very quickly, all of them together, 
mot making any sound. They looked at him out of the dark slot in their yellow eyes. 
Duny laughed and shouted it out again, the rhyme that gave him power over the goats. They came 
closer, crowing and pushing round him. All at once he felt afraid of their thick, ridged horns and their 
strange eyes and their strange silence. He tried to get free of them and to run away. The goats ran with 
him keeping in a knot around him, and so they came charging down into the village at last, all the goats 
going huddled together as if a rope were pulled tight round them, and the boy in the midst of them 
weeping and bellowing. Villagers ran from their houses to swear at the goats and laugh at the boy. 
Among them came the boy's aunt, who did not laugh. She said a word to the goats, and the beasts began 
to bleat and browse and wander, freed from the spell. 
"Come with me," she said to Deny. 
She took him into her hut where she lived alone. She let no child enter there usually, and the 
children feared the place. It was low and dusky, windowless, fragrant with herbs that hung drying from 
the cross-pole of the roof, mint and moly and thyme, yarrow and rushwash and paramal, kingsfoil, 
clovenfoot, tansy and bay. There his aunt sat crosslegged by the firepit, and looking sidelong at the boy 
through the tangles of her black hair she asked him what he had said to the goats, and if he knew what 
the rhyme was. When she found that he knew nothing, and yet had spellbound the goats to come to him 
and follow him, then she saw that he must have in him the makings of power. 
As her sister's son he had been nothing to her, but now she looked at him with a new eye. She 
praised him, and told him she might teach him rhymes he would like better, such as the word that makes 
a snail look out of its shell, or the name that calls a falcon down from the sky. 
"Aye, teach me that name!" he said, being clear over the fright the goats had given him, and puffed 
up with her praise of his cleverness. 
The witch said to him, "You will not ever tell that word to the other children, if I teach it to you." 
"I promise." 
She smiled at his ready ignorance. "Well and good. But I will bind your promise. Your tongue will 
be stilled until I choose to unbind it, and even then, though you can speak, you will not be able to speak 
the word I teach you where another person can hear it. We must keep the secrets of our craft." 
"Good," said the boy, for he had no wish to tell the secret to his playmates, liking to know and do 
what they knew not and could not. 
He sat still while his aunt bound back her un-combed hair, and knotted the belt of her dress, and sat 
crosslegged throwing handfuls of leaves into the firepit so that a smoke spread and filled the darkness of 

the hut. She began to sing, Her voice changed sometimes to low or high as if another voice sang through 
her, and the singing went on and on until the boy did not know if he waked or slept, and all the while the 
witch's old black dog that never barked sat by him with eyes red from the smoke. Then the witch spoke 
to Duny in a tongue he did not understand, and made him say with her certain rhymes and words until 
the enchantment came on him and held him still. 
"Speak!" she said to test the spell. 
The boy Could not speak, but he laughed. 
Then his aunt was a little afraid of his strength, for this was as strong a spell as she knew how to 
weave: she had tried not only to gain control of his speech and silence, but to bind him at the same time 
to her service in the craft of sorcery. Yet even as the spell bound him, he had laughed. She said nothing. 
She threw clear water on the fire till the smoke cleared away, and gave the boy water to drink, and when 
the air was clear and he could speak again she taught him the true name of the falcon, to which the 
falcon must come. 
This was Duny's first step on the way he was to follow all his life, the way of magery, the way that 
led him at last to hunt a shadow over land and sea to the lightless coasts of death's kingdom. But in those 
first steps along the way, it seemed a broad, bright road. 
When he found that the wild falcons stooped down to him from the wind when he summoned them 
by name, lighting with a thunder of wings on his wrist like the hunting-birds of a prince, then he 
hungered to know more such names and came to his aunt begging to learn the name of the sparrowhawk 
and the osprey and the eagle. To earn the words of power he did all the witch asked of him and learned 
of her all she taught, though not all of it was pleasant to do or know. There is a saying on Gont, Weak as 
woman's magic, and there is another saying, Wicked as woman's magic. Now the witch of Ten Alders 
was no black sorceress, nor did she ever meddle with the high arts or traffic with Old Powers; but being 
an ignorant woman among ignorant folk, she often used her crafts to foolish and dubious ends. She knew 
nothing of the Balance and the Pattern which the true wizard knows and serves, and which keep him 
from using his spells unless real need demands. She had a spell for every circumstance, and was forever 
wearing charms. Much of her lore was mere rubbish and humbug, nor did she know the true spells from 
the false. She knew many curses, and was better at causing sickness, perhaps, than at curing it. Like any 
village witch she could brew up a love-potion, but there were other, uglier brews she made to serve 
men's jealousy and hate. Such practices, however, she kept from her young prentice, and as far as she 
was able she taught him honest craft. 
At first all his pleasure in the art-magic was, childlike, the power it gave him over bird and beast, 
and the knowledge of these. And indeed that pleasure stayed with him all his life. Seeing him in the high 
pastures often with a bird of prey about him, the other children called him Sparrowhawk, and so he came 
by the name that he kept in later life as his use-name, when his true-name was not known. 
As the witch kept talking of the glory and the riches and the great power over men that a sorcerer 
could gain, he set himself to learn more useful lore. He was very quick at it. The witch praised him and 
the children of the village began to fear him, and he himself was sure that very soon he would become 
great among men. So he went on from word to word and from spell to spell with the witch till he was 
twelve years old and had learned from her a great part of what she knew: not much, but enough for the 
witchwife of a small village, and more than enough for a boy of twelve. She had taught him all her lore 
in herbals and healing, and all she knew of the crafts of finding, binding, mending, unsealing and 
revealing. What she knew of chanters' tales and the great Deeds she had sung him, and all the words of 

the True Speech that she had learned from the sorcerer that taught her, she taught again to Deny. And 
from weatherworkers and wandering jugglers who went from town to town of the Northward Vale and 
the East Forest he had learned various ticks and pleasantries, spells of Illusion. It was with one of these 
light spells that he first proved the great power that was in him. 
In those days the Kargad Empire was strong. Those are four great lands that lie between the 
Northern and the Eastern Reaches: Karego-At, Atuan, Hur-at-Hur, Atnini. The tongue they speak there 
is not like any spoken in the Archipelago or the other Reaches, and they are a savage people, whiteskinned, 
yellowhaired, and fierce, liking the sight of blood and the smell of burning towns. Last year 
they had attacked the Torikles and the strong island Torheven, raiding in great force in fleets of redsailed 
ships. News of this came north to Gont, but the Lords of Gont were busy with their piracy and paid 
small heed to the woes of other lands. Then Spevy fell to the Kargs and was looted and laid waste, its 
people taken as slaves, so that even now it is an isle of ruins. In lust of conquest the Kargs sailed next to 
Gont, coming in a host, thirty great longships, to East Port. They fought through that town, took it, 
burned it; leaving their ships under guard at the mouth of the River Ar they went up the Vale wrecking 
and looting, slaughtering cattle and men. As they went they split into bands, and each of these bands 
plundered where it chose. Fugitives brought warning to the villages of the heights. Soon the people of 
Ten Alders saw smoke darken the eastern sky, and that night those who climbed the High Fall looked 
down on the Vale all hazed and red-streaked with fires where fields ready for harvest had been set 
ablaze, and orchards burned, the fruit roasting on the blazing boughs, and urns and farmhouses 
smouldered in ruin. 
Some of the villagers fled up the ravines and hid in the forest, and some made ready to fight for 
their lives, and some did neither but stood about lamenting. The witch was one who fled; hiding alone in 
a cave up on the Kapperding Scarp and sealing the cave-mouth with spells. Duny's father the bronzesmith 
was one who stayed, for he would not leave his smelting-pit and forge where he had worked for 
fifty years. All that night he labored beating up what ready metal he had there into spearpoints, and 
others worked with him binding these to the handles of hoes and rakes; there being no time to make 
sockets and shaft them properly. There had been no weapons in the village but hunting bows and short 
knives, for the mountain folk of Cont are not warlike; it is not warriors they are famous for, but goatthieves, 
sea pirates, and wizards. 
With sunrise came a thick white fog, as on many autumn mornings in the heights of the island. 
Among their huts and houses down the straggling street of Ten'Alders the villagers stood waiting with 
their hunting bows and new-forged spears, not knowing whether the Kargs might be far-off or very near, 
all silent, all peering into the fog that hid shapes and distances and dangers from their eyes. 
With them was Duny. He had worked all night at the forgebellows, pushing and pulling the two 
long sleeves of goathide that fed the fire with a blast of sir. Now his arms so ached and trembled from 
that work that he could not hold out the spear he had chosen. He did not see how he could fight or be of 
any good to himself or the villagers. It rankled at his heart that he should die, spitted on a Kargish lance, 
while still a boy: that he should go into the dark land without ever having known his own name, his true 
name as a man. He looked down at his thin arms, wet with cold fogdew, and raged at his weakness, for 
he knew his strength. There was power in him, if he knew how to use it, and he sought among all the 
spells he knew for some device that might give him and his companions an advantage, or at least a 
chance. But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge. 
The fog was thinning now under the heat of the sun that shone bare above on the peak - in a bright 

sky. As the mists moved and parted in great drifts and smoky wisps, the villagers saw a band of warriors 
coming up the mountain. They were armored with bronze helmets and greaves and breastplates of heavy 
leather and shields of wood and bronze, and armed with swords and the long Kargish lance. Winding up 
along the steep bank of the Ar they came in a plumed, clanking, straggling line, near enough already that 
their white faces could be seen, and the words of their jargon heard as they shouted to one another. In 
this band of the invading horde there were about a hundred men, which is not many; but in the village 
were only eighteen men and boys. 
Now need called knowledge out: Duny, seeing the fog blow and thin across the path before the 
Kargs, saw a spell that might avail him. An old weatherworker of the Vale, seeking to win the boy as 
prentice, had taught him several charms. One of these tricks was called fogweaving, a binding-spell that 
gathers the mists together for a while in one place; with it one skilled in illusion can shape the mist into 
fair ghostly seemings, which last a little and fade away. The boy had no such skill, but his intent was 
different, and he had the strength to turn the spell to his own ends. Rapidly and aloud he named the 
places and the boundaries of the village, and then spoke the fogweaving charm, but in among its words 
he enlaced the words of a spell of concealment, and last he cried the word that set the magic going. 
Even as he did so his father coming up behind him struck him hard on the side of the head, 
knocking him right down. "Be still, fool! keep your blattering mouth shut, and hide if you can't fight!" 
Duny got to his feet. He could hear the Kargs now at the end of the village, as near as the great yewtree 
by the tanner's yard. Their voices were clear, and the clink and creak of their harness and arms, but 
they could not be seen. The fog had closed and thickened all over the village, greying the light, blurring 
the world till a man could hardly see his own hands before him. 
"I've hidden us all," Duny said, sullenly, for his head hurt from his father's blow, and the working 
of the doubled incantation had drained his strength. "I'll keep up this fog as long as I can. Get the others 
to lead them up to High Fall." 
The smith stared at his son who stood wraithlike in that weird, dank mist. It took him a minute to 
see Duny's meaning, but when he did he ran at once, noiselessly, knowing every fence and corner of the 
village, to find the others and tell them what to do. Now through the grey fog bloomed a blur of red, as 
the Kargs set fire to the thatch of a house. Still they did not come up into the village, but waited at the 
lower end till the mist should lift and lay bare their loot and prey. 
The tanner, whose house it was that burned, sent a couple of boys skipping right under the Kargs' 
noses, taunting and yelling and vanishing again like smoke into smoke. Meantime the older men, 
creeping behind fences and running from house to house, came close on the other side and sent a volley 
of arrows and spears at the warriors, who stood all in a bunch. One Karg fell writhing with a spear, still 
warm from its forging, right through his body. Others were arrow-bitten, and all enraged. They charged 
forward then to hew down their puny attackers, but they found only the fog about them, full of voices. 
They followed the voices, stabbing ahead into the mist with their great, plumed, bloodstained lances. Up 
the length of the street they came shouting, and never knew they had run right through the village, as the 
empty huts and houses loomed and disappeared again in the writhing grey fog. The villagers ran 
scattering, most of them keeping well ahead since they knew the ground; but some, boys or old men, 
were slow. The Kargs stumbling on them drove their lances or hacked with their swords, yelling their 
war-cry, the names of the White Godbrothers of Atuan: 
"Wuluah! Atwah!" 
Some of the band stopped when they felt the land grow rough underfoot, but others pressed right 

on, seeking the phantom village, following dim wavering shapes that fled just out of reach before them. 
All the mist had come alive with these fleeting forms, dodging, flickering, fading on every side. One 
group of the Kargs chased the wraiths straight to the High Fall, the cliff's edge above the springs of Ar, 
and the shapes they pursued ran out onto the air and there vanished in a thinning of the mist, while the 
pursuers fell screaming through fog and sudden sunlight a hundred feet sheer to the shallow pools 
among the rocks. And those that came behind and did not fall stood at the cliff's edge, listening. 
Now dread came into the Kargs' hearts and they began to seek one another, not the villagers, in the 
uncanny mist. They gathered on the hillside, and yet always there were wraiths and ghost-shapes among 
them; and other shapes that ran and stabbed from behind with spear or knife and vanished again. The 
Kargs began to run, all of them, downhill, stumbling, silent, until all at once they ran out from the grey 
blind mist and saw the river and the ravines below the village all bare and bright in morning sunlight. 
Then they stopped, gathering together, and looked back. A wall of wavering, writhing grey lay blank 
across the path, hiding all that lay behind it. Out from it burst two or three stragglers, lunging and 
stumbling along, their long lances rocking on their shoulders. Not one Karg looked back more than that 
once. All went down, in haste, away from the enchanted place. 
Farther down the Northward Vale those warriors got their fill of fighting. The towns of the East 
Forest, from Ovark to the coast, had gathered their men and sent them against the invaders of Gont. 
Band after band they came down from the hills, and that day and the next the Kargs were harried back 
down to the beaches above East Port, where they found their ships burnt; so they fought with their backs 
to the sea till every man of them was killed, and the sands of Armouth were brown with blood until the 
tide came in. 
But on that morning in Ten Alders village and up on the High Fall, the dank grey fog had clung a 
while, and then suddenly it blew and drifted and melted away. This man and that stood up in the windy 
brightness of the morning, and looked about him wondering. Here lay a dead Karg with yellow hair 
long, loose; and bloody; there lay the village tanner, killed in battle like a king. 
Down in the village the house that bad been set afire still blazed. They ran to put the fire out, since 
their battle had been won. In the street, near the great yew, they found Duny the bronze-smith's son 
standing by himself, bearing no hurt, but speechless and stupid like one stunned. They were well aware 
of what he had done, and they led him into his father's house and went calling for the witch to come 
down out of her cave and heal the lad who had saved their lives and their property, all but four who were 
killed by the Kargs, and the one house that was burnt. 
No weapon-hurt had come to the boy, but he would not speak nor eat nor sleep; he seemed not to 
hear what was said to him, not to see those who came to see him. There was none in those parts wizard 
enough to cure what ailed him. His aunt said, "He has overspent his power," but she had no art to help 
him. 
While he lay thus dark and dumb, the story of the lad who wove the fog and scared off Kargish 
swordsmen with a mess of shadows was told all down the Northward Vale, and in the East Forest, and 
high on the mountain and over the mountain even in the Great Port of Gont. So it happened that on the 
fifth day after the slaughter at Armouth a stranger came into Ten Alders village, a man neither young nor 
old, who came cloaked and bareheaded, lightly carrying a great staff of oak that was as tall as himself. 
He did not come up the course of the Ar like most people, but down, out of the forests of the higher 
mountainside. The village goodwives saw well that he was a wizard, and when he told them that he was 
a healall, they brought him straight to the smith's house. Sending away all but the boy's father and aunt 

the stranger stooped above the cot where Duny lay staring into the dark, and did no more than lay his 
hand on the boy's forehead and touch his lips once. 
Duny sat up slowly looking about him. In a little while he spoke, and strength and hunger began to 
come back into him. They gave him a little to drink and eat, and he lay back again, always watching the 
stranger with dark wondering eyes. 
The bronze-smith said to that stranger, "You are no common man." 
"Nor will this boy be a common man," the other answered. "The tale of his deed with the fog has 
come to Re Albi, which is my home. I have come here to give him his name, if as they say he has not yet 
made his passage into manhood." 
The witch whispered to the smith, "Brother, this must surely be the Mage of Re Albi, Ogion the 
Silent, that one who tamed the earthquake-" 
"Sir," said the bronze-smith who would not let a great name daunt him, "my son will be thirteen 
this month coming, but we thought to hold his Passage at the feast of Sunreturn this winter." 
"Let him be named as soon as may be," said the mage, "for he needs his name. I have other 
business now, but I will come back here for the day you choose. If you see fit I will take him with me 
when I go thereafter. And if he prove apt I will keep him as prentice, or see to it that he is schooled as 
fits his gifts. For to keep dark the mind of the mageborn, that is a dangerous thing." 
Very gently Ogion spoke, but with certainty, and even the hardheaded smith assented to all he said. 
On the day the boy was thirteen years old, a day in the early splendor of autumn while still the 
bright leaves are on the trees, Ogion returned to the village from his rovings over Gont Mountain, and 
the ceremony of Passage was held. The witch took from the boy his name Duny, the name his mother 
had given him as a baby. Nameless and naked he walked into the cold springs of the Ar where it rises 
among rocks under the high cliffs. As he entered the water clouds crossed the sun's face and great 
shadows slid and mingled over the water of the pool about him. He crossed to the far bank, shuddering 
with cold but walking slow and erect as be should through that icy, living water. As he came to the bank 
Ogion, waiting, reached out his hand and clasping the boy's arm whispered to him his true name: Ged. 
Thus was he given his name by one very wise in the uses of power. 
The feasting was far from over, and all the villagers were making merry with plenty to eat and beer 
to drink and a chanter from down the Vale singing the Deed of the Dragonlords, when the mage spoke in 
his quiet voice to Ged: "Come, lad. Bid your people farewell and leave them feasting." 
Ged fetched what he had to carry, which was the good bronze knife his father had forged him, and a 
leather coat the tanner's widow had cut down to his size, and an alderstick his aunt had becharmed for 
him: that was all he owned besides his shirt and breeches. He said farewell to them, all the people he 
knew in all the world, and looked about once at the village that straggled and huddled there under the 
cliffs, over the river-springs. Then he set off with his new master through the steep slanting forests of the 
mountain isle, through the leaves and shadows of bright autumn. 
------ 
2 The Shadow 
------ 

 Ged had thought that as the prentice of a great mage he would enter at once into the mystery and 
mastery of power. He would understand the language of the beasts and the speech of the leaves of the 
forest, he thought, and sway the winds with his word, and learn to change himself into any shape he 
wished. Maybe he and his master would run together as stags, or fly to Re Albi over the mountain on the 
wings of eagles. 
But it was not so at all. They wandered, first down into the Vale and then gradually south and 
westward around the mountain, given lodging in little villages or spending the night out in the 
wilderness, like poor journeyman-sorcerers, or tinkers, or beggars. They entered no mysterious domain. 
Nothing happened. The mage's oaken staff that Ged had watched at first with eager dread was nothing 
but a stout staff to walk with. Three days went by and four days went by and still Ogion had not spoken 
a single charm in Ged's hearing, and had not taught him a single name or rune or spell. 
Though a very silent man he was so mild and calm that Ged soon lost his awe of him, and in a day 
or two more he was bold enough to ask his master, "When will my apprenticeship begin, Sir?" 
"It has begun," said Ogion. 
There was a silence, as if Ged was keeping back something he had to say. Then he said it: "But I 
haven't learned anything yet!" 
"Because you haven't found out what I am teaching," replied the mage, going on at his steady, longlegged 
pace along their road, which was the high pass between Ovark and Wiss. He was a dark man, like 
most Gontishmen, dark copper-brown; grey-haired, lean and tough as a hound, tireless. He spoke 
seldom, ate little, slept less. His eyes and ears were very keen, and often there was a listening look on his 
face. 
Ged did not answer him. It is not always easy to answer a mage. 
"You want to work spells," Ogion said presently, striding along. "You've drawn too much water 
from that well. Wait. Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience. What is that herb by the 
path?" 
"Strawflower." 
"And that?" 
"I don't know." 
"Fourfoil, they call it." Ogion had halted, the coppershod foot of his staff near the little weed, so 
Ged looked closely at the plant, and plucked a dry seedpod from it, and finally asked, since Ogion said 
nothing more, "What is its use, Master?" 
"None I know of." 
Ged kept the seedpod a while as they went on, then tossed it away. 
"When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and 
seed, then you may learn its true name, knowing its being: which is more than its use. What, after all, is 
the use of you? or of myself? Is Gont Mountain useful, or the Open Sea?" Ogion went on a halfmile or 
so, and said at last, "To hear, one must be silent." The boy frowned. He did not like to be made to feel 
a fool. He kept back his resentment and impatience, and tried to be obedient, so that Ogion would 
consent at last to teach him something. For he hungered to learn, to gain power. It began to seem to him, 
though, that he could have learned more walking with any herb-gatherer or village sorcerer, and as they 
went round the mountain westward into the lonely forests past Wiss he wondered more and more what 
was the greatness and the magic of this great Mage Ogion. For when it rained Ogion would not even say 
the spell that every weatherworker knows, to send the storm aside. In a land where sorcerers come thick, 

like Gont or the Enlades, you may see a raincloud blundering slowly from side to side and place to place 
as one spell shunts it on to the next, till at last it is buffeted out over the sea where it can rain in peace. 
But Ogion let the rain fall where it would. He found a thick fir-tree and lay down beneath it. Ged 
crouched among the dripping bushes wet and sullen, and wondered what was the good of having power 
if you were too wise to use it, and wished he had gone as prentice to that old weatherworker of the Vale, 
where at least he would have slept dry. He did not speak any of his thoughts aloud. He said not a word. 
His master smiled, and fell asleep in the rain. 
Along towards Sunreturn when the first heavy snows began to fall in the heights of Gont they came 
to Re Albi, Ogion's home. It is a town on the edge of the high rocks of Overfell, and its name means 
Falcon's Nest. From it one can see far below the deep harbor and the towers of the Port of Gont, and the 
ships that go in and out the gate of the bay between the Armed Cliffs, and far to the west across the sea 
one may make out the blue hills of Oranea, easternmost of the Inward Isles. 
The mage's house, though large and soundly built of timber, with hearth and chimney rather than a 
firepit, was like the huts of Ten Alders village: all one room, with a goatshed built onto one side. There 
was a kind of alcove in the west wall of the room, where Ged slept. Over his pallet was a window that 
looked out on the sea, but most often the shutters must be closed against the great winds that blew all 
winter from the west and north. In the dark warmth of that house Ged spent the winter, hearing the rush 
of rain and wind outside or the silence of snowfall, learning to write and read the Six Hundred Runes of 
Hardic. Very glad he was to learn this lore, for without it no mere rote-learning of charms and spells will 
give a man true mastery. The Hardic tongue of the Archipelago, though it has no more magic power in it 
than any other tongue of men, has its roots in the Old Speech, that language in which things are named 
with their true names: and the way to the understanding of this speech starts with the Runes that were 
written when the islands of the world first were raised up from the sea. 
Still no marvels and enchantments occurred. All winter there was nothing but the heavy pages of 
the Runebook turning, and the rain and the snow falling; and Ogion would come in from roaming the icy 
forests or from looking after his goats, and stamp the snow off his boots, and sit down in silence by the 
fire. And the mage's long, listening silence would fill the room, and fill Ged's mind, until sometimes it 
seemed he had forgotten what words sounded like: and when Ogion spoke at last it was as if he had, just 
then and for the first time, invented speech. Yet the words he spoke were no great matters but had to do 
only with simple things, bread and water and weather and sleep. 
As the spring came on, quick and bright, Ogion often sent Ged forth to gather herbs on the 
meadows above Re Albi, and told him to take as long as he liked about it, giving him freedom to spend 
all day wandering by rainfilled streams and through the woods and over wet green fields in the sun. Ged 
went with delight each time, and stayed out till night; but he did not entirely forget the herbs. He kept an 
eye out for them, while he climbed and roamed and waded and explored, and always brought some 
home. He came on a meadow between two streams where the flower called white hallows grew thick, 
and as these blossoms are rare and prized by healers, he came back again next day. Someone else was 
there before him, a girl, whom he knew by sight as the daughter of the old Lord of Re Albi. He would 
not have spoken to her, but she came to him and greeted him pleasantly: "I know you, you are the 
Sparrowhawk, our mage's adept. I wish you would tell me about sorcery!" 
He looked down at the white flowers that brushed against her white skirt, and at first he was shy 
and glum and hardly answered. But she went on talking, in an open, careless, wilful way that little by 
little set him at ease. She was a tall girl of about his own age, very sallow, almost white-skinned; her 

mother, they said in the village, was from Osskil or some such foreign land. Her hair fell long and 
straight like a fall of black water. Ged thought her very ugly, but he had a desire to please her, to win her 
admiration, that grew on him as they talked. She made him tell all the story of his tricks with the mist 
that had defeated the Kargish warriors, and she listened as if she wondered and admired, but she spoke 
no praise. And soon she was off on another tack: "Can you call the birds and beasts to you?" she asked. 
"I can," said Ged. 
He knew there was a falcon's nest in the cliffs above the meadow, and he summoned the bird by its 
name. It came, but it would not light on his wrist, being put off no doubt by the girl's presence. It 
screamed and struck the air with broad barred wings, and rose up on the wind. 
"What do you call that kind of charm, that made the falcon come?" 
"A spell of Summoning." 
"Can you call the spirits of the dead to come to you, too?" 
He thought she was mocking him with this question, because the falcon had not fully obeyed his 
summons. He would not let her mock him. "I might if I chose," he said in a calm voice. 
"Is it not very difficult, very dangerous, to summon a spirit?" 
"Difficult, yes. Dangerous?" He shrugged. 
This time be was almost certain there was admiration in her eyes. 
"Can you make a love-charm?" 
"That is no mastery." 
"True," says she, "any village witch can do it. Can you do Changing spells? Can you change your 
own shape, as wizards do, they say?" 
Again he was not quite sure that she did not ask the question mockingly, and so again he replied, "I 
might if I chose." 
She began to beg him to transform himself into anything he wished - a hawk, a bull, a fire, a tree. 
He put her off with sort secretive words such as his master used, but he did not know how to refuse 
flatly when she coaxed him; and besides he did not know whether he himself believed his boast, or not. 
He left her, saying that his master the mage expected him at home, and he did not come back to the 
meadow the next day. But the day after he came again, saying to himself that he should gather more of 
the flowers while they bloomed. She was there, and together they waded barefoot in the boggy grass, 
pulling the heavy white hallow-blooms. The sun of spring shone, and she talked with him as merrily as 
any goatherd lass of his own village. She asked him again about sorcery, and listened wide-eyed to all he 
told her, so that he fell to boasting again. Then she asked him if he would not work a Changing spell, 
and when he put her off, she looked at him, putting back the black hair from her face, and said, "Are you 
afraid to do it?" 
"No, I am not afraid." 
She smiled a little disdainfully and said, "Maybe you are too young." 
That he would not endure. He did not say much, but he resolved that he would prove himself to her. 
He told her to come again to the meadow tomorrow, if she liked, and so took leave of her, and came 
back to the house while his master was still out. He went straight to the shelf and took down the two 
Lore-Books, which Ogion had never yet opened in his presence. 
He looked for a spell of self-transformation, but being slow to read the runes yet and understanding 
little of what he read, he could not find what he sought. These books were very ancient, Ogion having 
them from his own master Heleth Farseer, and Heleth from his master the Mage of Perregal, and so back 

into the times of myth. Small and strange was the writing, overwritten and interlined by many hands, 
and all those hands were dust now. Yet here and there Ged understood something of what he tried to 
read, and with the girl's questions and her mockery always in his mind, he stopped on a page that bore a 
spell of summoning up the spirits of the dead. 
As he read it, puzzling out the runes and symbols one by one, a horror came over him. His eyes 
were fixed, and he could not lift them till he had finished reading all the spell. 
Then raising his head he saw it was dark in the house. He had been reading without any light, in the 
darkness. He could not now make out the runes when he looked down at the book. Yet the horror grew 
in him, seeming to hold him bound in his chair. He was cold. Looking over his shoulder he saw that 
something was crouching beside the closed door, a shapeless clot of shadow darker than the darkness. It 
seemed to reach out towards him, and to whisper, and to call to him in a whisper: but he could not 
understand the words. 
The door was flung wide. A man entered with a white light flaming about him, a great bright figure 
who spoke aloud, fiercely and suddenly. The darkness and the whispering ceased and were dispelled. 
The horror went out of Ged, but still he was mortally afraid, for it was Ogion the Mage who stood 
there in the doorway with a brightness all about him, and the oaken staff in his hand burned with a white 
radiance. 
Saying no word the mage came past Ged, and lighted the lamp, and put the books away on their 
shelf. Then be turned to the boy and said, "You will never work that spell but in peril of your power and 
your life. Was it for that spell you opened the books?" 
"No, Master," the boy murmured, and shamefully he told Ogion what he had sought, and why. 
"You do not remember what I told you, that that girl's mother, the Lord's wife, is an enchantress?" 
Indeed Ogion had once said this, but Ged had not paid much attention, though he knew by now that 
Ogion never told him anything that he had not good reason to tell him. 
"The girl herself is half a witch already. It may be the mother who sent the girl to talk to you. It 
may be she who opened the book to the page you read. The powers she serves are not the powers I 
serve: I do not know her will, but I know she does not will me well. Ged, listen to me now. Have you 
never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we 
play for pleasure or for praise. Think of this: that every word, every act of our Art is said and is done 
either for good, or for evil. Before you speak or do you must know the price that is to pay!" 
Driven by his shame Ged cried, "How am I to know these things, when you teach me nothing? 
Since I lived with you I have done nothing, seen nothing-" 
"Now you have seen something," said the mage. "By the door, in the darkness, when I came in." 
Ged was silent. 
Ogion knelt down and built the fire on the hearth and lit it, for the house was cold. Then still 
kneeling he said in his quiet voice, "Ged, my young falcon, you are not bound to me or to my service. 
You did not come to me, but I to you. You are very young to make this choice, but I cannot make it for 
you. If you wish, I will send you to Roke Island, where all high arts are taught. Any craft you undertake 
to learn you will learn, for your power is great. Greater even than your pride, I hope. I would keep you 
here with me, for what I have is what you lack, but I will not keep you against your will. Now choose 
between Re Albi and Roke." 
Ged stood dumb, his heart bewildered. He had come to love this man Ogion who had healed him 
with a touch, and who had no anger: he loved him, and had not known it until now. He looked at the 

oaken staff leaning in the chimneycorner, remembering the radiance of it that had burned out evil from 
the dark, and he yearned to stay with Ogion, to go wandering through the forests with him, long and far, 
learning how to be silent. Yet other cravings were in him that would not be stilled, the wish for glory, 
the will to act. Ogion's seemed a long road towards mastery, a slow bypath to follow, when he might go 
sailing before the seawinds straight to the Inmost Sea, to the Isle of the Wise, where the air was bright 
with enchantments and the Archmage walked amidst wonders. 
"Master," he said, "I will go to Roke." 
So a few days later on a sunny morning of spring Ogion strode beside him down the steep road 
from the Overfell, fifteen miles to the Great Port of Gont. There at the landgate between carven dragons 
the guards of the City of Gont, seeing the mage, knelt with bared swords and welcomed him. They knew 
him and did him honor by the Prince's order and their own will, for ten years ago Ogion had saved the 
city from earthquake that would have shaken the towers of the rich down to the ground and closed the 
channel of the Armed Cliffs with avalanche. He had spoken to the Mountain of Gont, calming it, and 
had stilled the trembling precipices of the Overfell as one soothes a frightened beast. Ged had heard 
some talk of this, and now, wondering to see the armed guardsmen kneel to his quiet master, he 
remembered it. He glanced up almost in fear at this man who had stopped an earthquake; but Ogion's 
face was quiet as always. 
They went down to the quays, where the Harbormaster came hastening to welcome Ogion and ask 
what service he might do. The mage told him, and at once he named a ship bound for the Inmost Sea 
aboard which Ged might go as passenger. "Or they will take him as windbringer," he said, "if he has the 
craft. They have no weatherworker aboard." 
"He has some skill with mist and fog, but none with seawinds," the mage said, putting his hand 
lightly on Ged's shoulder. "Do not try any tricks with the sea and the winds of the sea, Sparrowhawk; 
you are a landsman still. Harbormaster, what is the ship's name?" 
"Shadow, from the Andrades, bound to Hort Town with furs and ivories. A good ship, Master 
Ogion." 
The mage's face darkened at the name of the ship, but he said, "So be it. Give this writing to the 
Warden of the School on Roke, Sparrowhawk. Go with a fair wind. Farewelll" 
That was all his parting. He turned away, and went striding up the street away from the quays. Ged 
stood forlorn and watched his master go. 
"Come along, lad," said the Harbormaster, and took him down the waterfront to the pier where 
Shadow was making ready to sail. 
It might seem strange that on an island fifty miles wide, in a village under cliffs that stare out 
forever on the sea, a child may grow to manhood never having stepped in a boat or dipped his finger in 
salt water, but so it is. Farmer, goatherd, cattleherd, hunter or artisan, the landsman looks at the ocean as 
at a salt unsteady realm that has nothing to do with him at all. The village two days' walk from his 
village is a foreign land, and the island a day's sail from his island is a mere rumor, misty hills seen 
across the water, not solid ground like that he walks on. 
So to Ged who had never been down from the heights of the mountain, the Port of Gont was an 
awesome and marvellous place, the great houses and towers of cut stone and waterfront of piers and 
docks and basins and moorages, the seaport where half a hundred boats and galleys rocked at quayside 
or lay hauled up and overturned for repairs or stood out at anchor in the roadstead with furled sails and 
closed oarports, the sailors shouting in strange dialects and the longshoremen running heavyladen 

amongst barrels and boxes and coils of rope and stacks of oars, the bearded merchants in furred robes 
conversing quietly as they picked their way along the slimy stones above the water, the fishermen 
unloading their catch, coopers pounding and shipmakers hammering and clamsellers singing and 
shipmasters bellowing, and beyond all the silent, shining bay. With eyes and ears and mind bewildered 
he followed the Harbormaster to the broad dock where Shadow was tied up, and the harbormaster 
brought him to the master of the ship. 
With few words spoken the ship's master agreed to take Ged as passenger to Roke, since it was a 
mage that asked it; and the Harbormaster left the boy with him. The master of the Shadow was a big 
man, and fat, in a red cloak trimmed with pellawi-fur such as Andradean merchants wear. He never 
looked at Ged but asked him in a mighty voice, "Can you work weather, boy?" 
"I can. " 
"Can you bring the wind?' 
He had to say he could not, and with that the master told him to find a place out of the way and stay 
in it. 
The oarsmen were coming aboard now, for the ship was to go out into the roadstead before night 
fell, and sail with the ebb-tide near dawn. There was no place out of the way, but Ged climbed up as 
well as he could onto the bundled, lashed, and hide-covered cargo in the stern of the ship, and clinging 
there watched all that passed. The oarsmen came leaping aboard, sturdy men with great arms, while 
longshoremen rolled water barrels thundering out the dock and stowed them under the rowers' benches. 
The wellbuilt ship rode low with her burden, yet danced a little on the lapping shore-waves, ready to be 
gone. Then the steersman took his place at the right of the sternpost, looking forward to the ship's 
master, who stood on a plank let in at the jointure of the keel with the stem, which was carved as the Old 
Serpent of Andrad. The master roared his orders hugely, and Shadow was untied and towed clear of the 
docks by two laboring rowboats. Then the master's roar was "Open ports!" and the great oars shot 
rattling out, fifteen to a side. The rowers bent their strong backs while a lad up beside the master beat the 
stroke on a drum. Easy as a gull oared by her wings the ship went now, and the noise and hurly-burly of 
the City fell away suddenly behind. They came out in the silence of the waters of the bay, and over them 
rose the white peak of the Mountain, seeming to hang above the sea. In a shallow creek in the lee of the 
southern Armed Cliff the anchor was thrown over, and there they rode the night. 
Of the seventy crewmen of the ship some were like Ged very young in years, though all had made 
their passage into manhood. These lads called him over to share food and drink with them, and were 
friendly though rough and full of jokes and jibes. They called him Goatherd, of course, because he was 
Gontish, but they did not go further than that. He was as tall and strong as the fifteen-year-olds, and 
quick to return either a good word or a jeer; so he made his way among them and even that first night 
began to live as one of them and learn their work. This suited the ship's officers, for there was no room 
aboard for idle passengers. 
There was little enough room for the crew, and no comfort at all, in an undecked galley crowded 
with men and gear and cargo; but what was comfort to Ged? He lay that night among corded rolls of 
pelts from the northern isles and watched the stars of spring above the harbor waters and the little yellow 
lights of the City astern, and he slept and waked again full of delight. Before dawn the tide turned. They 
raised anchor and rowed softly out between the Armed Cliffs. As sunrise reddened the Mountain of Gont 
behind them they raised the high sail and ran southwestward over the Gontish Sea. 
Between Barnisk and Torheven they sailed with a light wind, and on the second day came in sight 

of Havnor, the Great Island, heart and hearth of the Archipelago. For three days they were in sight of the 
green hills of Havnor as they worked along its eastern coast, but they did not come to shore. Not for 
many years did Ged set foot on that land or see the white towers of Havnor Great Port at the center of 
the world. 
They lay over one night at Kembermouth, the northern port of Way Island, and the next at a little 
town on the entrance of Felkway Bay, and the next day passed the northern cape of O and entered the 
Ebavnor Straits. There they dropped sail and rowed, always with land on either side and always within 
hail of other ships, great and small, merchants and traders, some bound in from the Outer Reaches with 
strange cargo after a voyage of years and others that hopped like sparrows from isle to isle of the Inmost 
Sea. Turning southward out of the crowded Straits they left Havnor astern and sailed between the two 
fair islands Ark and Ilien, towered and terraced with cities, and then through rain and rising wind began 
to beat their way across the Inmost Sea to Roke Island. 
In the night as the wind freshened to a gale they took down both sail and mast, and the next day, all 
day, they rowed. The long ship lay steady on the waves and went gallantly, but the steersman at the long 
steering-sweep in the stern looked into the rain that beat the sea and saw nothing but the rain. They went 
southwest by the pointing of the magnet, knowing how they went, but not through what waters. Ged 
heard men speak of the shoal waters north of Roke, and of the Borilous Rocks to the east; others argued 
that they might be far out of course by now, in the empty waters south of Kamery. Still the wind grew 
stronger, tearing the edges of the great waves into flying tatters of foam, and still they rowed southwest 
with the wind behind them. The stints at the oars were shortened, for the labor was very hard; the 
younger lads were set two to an oar, and Ged took his turn with the others as he had since they left Gont. 
When they did not row they bailed, for the seas broke heavy on the ship. So they labored among the 
waves that ran like smoking mountains under the wind, while the rain beat hard and cold on their backs, 
and the drum thumped through the noise of the storm like a heart thumping. 
A man came to take Ged's place at the oar, sending him to the ship's master in the bow. Rainwater 
dripped from the hem of the master's cloak, but he stood stout as a winebarrel on his bit of decking and 
looking down at Ged he asked, "Can you abate this wind, lad?" 
"No, sir." 
"Have you craft with iron?" 
He meant, could Ged make the compass-needle point their way to Roke, making the magnet follow 
not its north but their need. That skill is a secret of the Seamasters, and again Ged must say no. 
"Well then," the master bellowed through the wind and rain, "you must find some ship to take you 
back to Roke from Hort Town. Roke must be west of us now, and only wizardry could bring us there 
through this sea. We must keep south." 
Ged did not like this, for he had heard the sailors talk of Hort Town, how it was a lawless place, full 
of evil traffic, where men were often taken and sold into slavery in the South Reach. Returning to his 
labor at the oar he pulled away with his companion, a sturdy Andradean lad, and heard the drum beat the 
stroke and saw the lantern hung on the stern bob and flicker as the wind plucked it about, a tormented 
fleck of light in the rain-lashed dusk. He kept looking to westward, as often as he could in the heavy 
rhythm of pulling the oar. And as the ship rose on a high swell he saw for a moment over the dark 
smoking water a light between clouds, as it might be the last gleam of sunset: but this was a clear light, 
not red. 
His oar-mate had not seen it, but he called it out. The steersman watched for it on each rise of the 

great waves, and saw it as Ged saw it again, but shouted back that it was only the setting sun. Then Ged 
called to one of the lads that was bailing to take his place on the bench a minute, and made his way 
forward again along the encumbered aisle between the benches, and catching hold of the carved prow to 
keep from being pitched overboard he shouted up to the master, "Sir! that light to the west is Roke 
Island!" 
"I saw no light," the master roared, but even as he spoke Ged flung out his arm pointing, and all 
saw the light gleam clear in the west over the heaving scud and tumult of the sea. 
Not for his passenger's sake, but to save his ship from the peril of the storm, the master shouted at 
once to the steersman to head westward toward the light. But he said to Ged, "Boy, you speak like a 
Seamaster, but I tell you if you lead us wrong in this weather I will throw you over to swim to Roke!" 
Now instead of running before the storm they must row across the wind's way, and it was hard: 
waves striking the ship abeam pushed her always south of their new course, and rolled her, and filled her 
with water so that bailing must be ceaseless, and the oarsmen must watch lest the ship rolling should lift 
their oars out of water as they pulled and so pitch them down among the benches. It was nearly dark 
under the stormclouds, but now and again they made out the light to the west, enough to set course by, 
and so struggled on. At last the wind dropped a little, and the light grew broad before them. They rowed 
on, and they came as it were through a curtain, between one oarstroke and the next running out of the 
storm into a clear air, where the light of after-sunset glowed in the sky and on the sea. Over the foamcrested 
waves they saw not far off a high, round, green hill, and beneath it a town built on a small bay 
where boats lay at anchor, all in peace. 
The steersman leaning on his long sweep turned his bead and called, "Sir! is this true land or a 
witchery?" 
"Keep her as she goes, you witless woodenhead! Row, you spineless slave-sons! That's Thwil Bay 
and the Knoll of Roke, as any fool could see! Row!" 
So to the beat of the drum they rowed wearily into the bay. There it was still, so that they could 
hear the voices of people up in the town, and a bell ringing, and only far off the hiss and roaring of the 
storm. Clouds hung dark to north and east and south a mile off all about the island. But over Roke stars 
were coming out one by one in a clear and quiet sky. 
--------- 
3 The School for Wizards 
--------- 
Ged slept that night aboard Shadow, and early in the morning parted with those first sea-comrades 
of his, they shouting good wishes cheerily after him as he went up the docks. The town of Thwil is not 
large, its high houses huddling close over a few steep narrow streets. To Ged, however, it seemed a city, 
and not knowing where to go he asked the first townsman of Thwil he met where he would find the 
Warder of the School on Roke. The man looked at him sidelong a while and said, "The wise don't need 
to ask, the fool asks in vain," and so went on along the street. Ged went uphill till he came out into a 
square, rimmed on three sides by the houses with their sharp slate roofs and on the fourth side by the 
wall of a great building whose few small windows were higher than the chimneytops of the houses: a 
fort or castle it seemed, built of mighty grey blocks of stone. In the square beneath it market-booths were 

set up and there was some coming and going of people. Ged asked his question of an old woman with a 
basket of mussels, and she replied, "You cannot always find the Warder where he is, but sometimes you 
find him where he is not," and went on crying her mussels to sell. 
In the great building, near one corner, there was a mean little door of wood. Ged went to this and 
knocked loud. To the old man who opened the door he said, "I bear a letter from the Mage Ogion of 
Gont to the Warder of the School on this island. I want to find the Warder, but I will not hear more 
riddles and scoffing!" 
"This is the School," the old man said mildly. "I am the doorkeeper. Enter if you can." 
Ged stepped forward. It seemed to him that he had passed through the doorway: yet he stood 
outside on the pavement where he had stood before. 
Once more he stepped forward, and once more he remained standing outside the door. The 
doorkeeper, inside, watched him with mild eyes. 
Ged was not so much baffled as angry, for this seemed like a further mockery to him. With voice 
and hand he made the Opening spell which his aunt had taught him long ago; it was the prize among all 
her stock of spells, and he wove it well now. But it was only a witch's charm, and the power that held 
this doorway was not moved at all. 
When that failed Ged stood a long while there on the pavement. At last he looked at the old man 
who waited inside. "I cannot enter," he said unwillingly, "unless you help me." 
The doorkeeper answered, "Say your name." 
Then again Ged stood still a while; for a man never speaks his own name aloud, until more than his 
life's safety is at stake. 
"I am Ged," he said aloud. Stepping forward then he entered the open doorway. Yet it seemed to 
him that though the light was behind him, a shadow followed him in at his heels. 
He saw also as he turned that the doorway through which he had come was not plain wood as he 
had thought, but ivory without joint or seam: it was cut, as he knew later, from a tooth of the Great 
Dragon. The door that the old man closed behind him was of polished horn, through which the daylight 
shone dimly, and on its inner face was carved the Thousand-Leaved Tree. 
"Welcome to this house, lad," the doorkeeper said, and without saying more led him through halls 
and corridors to an open court far inside the walls of the building. The court was partly paved with stone, 
but was roofless, and on a grassplot a fountain played under young trees in the sunlight. There Ged 
waited alone some while. He stood still, and his heart beat hard, for it seemed to him that he felt 
presences and powers at work unseen about him here, and he knew that this place was built not only of 
stone but of magic stronger than stone. He stood in the innermost room of the House of the Wise, and it 
was open to the sky. Then suddenly he was aware of a man clothed in white who watched him through 
the falling water of the fountain. 
As their eyes met, a bird sang aloud in the branches of the tree. In that moment Ged understood the 
singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the 
clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves: it seemed to him that he himself 
was a word spoken by the sunlight. 
Then that moment passed, and he and the world were as before, or almost as before. He went 
forward to kneel before the Archmage, holding out to him the letter written by Ogion. 
The Archmage Nemmerle, Warder of Roke, was an old man, older it was said than any man then 
living. His voice quavered like the bird's voice when he spoke, welcoming Ged kindly. His hair and 

beard and robe were white, and he seemed as if all darkness and heaviness had been leached out of him 
by the slow usage of the years, leaving him white and worn as driftwood that has been a century adrift. 
"My eyes are old, I cannot read what your master writes," he said in his quavering voice. "Read me the 
letter, lad." 
So Ged made out and read aloud the writing, which was in Hardic runes, and said no more than 
this: Lord Nemmerle! I send you one who will be greatest of the wizards of Gont, if the wind blow true. 
This was signed, not with Ogion's true name which Ged had never yet learned, but with Ogion's rune, 
the Closed Mouth. 
"He who holds the earthquake on a leash has sent you, for which be doubly welcome. Young Ogion 
was dear to me, when he came here from Gont. Now tell me of the seas and portents of your voyage, 
lad." 
"A fair passage, Lord, but for the storm yesterday." 
"What ship brought you here?" 
"Shadow, trading from the Andrades." 
"Whose will sent you here?" 
"My own." 
The Archmage looked at Ged and looked away, and began to speak in a tongue that Ged did not 
understand, mumbling as will an old old man whose wits go wandering among the years and islands. Yet 
in among his mumbling there were words of what the bird had sung and what the water had said falling. 
He was not laying a spell and yet there was a power in his voice that moved Ged's mind so that the boy 
was bewildered, and for an instant seemed to behold himself standing in a strange vast desert place alone 
among shadows. Yet all along he was in the sunlit court, hearing the fountain fall. 
A great black bird, a raven of Osskil, came walking over the stone terrace and the grass. It came to 
the hem of the Archmage's robe and stood there all black with its dagger beak and eyes like pebbles, 
staring sidelong at Ged. It pecked three times on the white staff Nemmerle leaned on, and the old wizard 
ceased his muttering, and smiled. "Run and play, lad," he said at last as to a little child. Ged knelt again 
on one knee to him. When he rose, the Archmage was gone. Only the raven stood eyeing him, its beak 
outstretched as if to peck the vanished staff. 
It spoke, in what Ged guessed might be the speech of Osskil. "Terrenon ussbuk!" it said croaking. 
"Terrenon ussbuk orrek!" And it strutted off as it had come. 
Ged turned to leave the courtyard, wondering where he should go. Under the archway he was met 
by a tall youth who greeted him very courteously, bowing his bead. "I am called Jasper, Enwit's son of 
the Domain of Eolg on Havnor Isle. I am at your service today, to show you about the Great House and 
answer your questions as I can. How shall I call you, Sir?" 
Now it seemed to Ged, a mountain villager who had never been among the sons of rich merchants 
and noblemen, that this fellow was scoffing at him with his "service" and his "Sir" and his bowing and 
scraping. He answered shortly, "Sparrowhawk, they call me." 
The other waited a moment as if expecting some more mannerly response, and getting none 
straightened up and turned a little aside. He was two or three years older than Ged, very tall, and he 
moved and carried himself with stiff grace, posing (Ged thought) like a dancer. He wore a grey cloak 
with hood thrown back. The first place he took Ged was the wardrobe room, where as a student of the 
school Ged might find himself another such cloak that fitted him, and any other clothing he might need. 
He put on the darkgrey cloak he had chosen, and Jasper said, "Now you are one of us." 

 Jasper had a way of smiling faintly as he spoke which made Ged look for a jeer hidden in his polite 
words. "Do clothes make the mage?" he answered, sullen. 
"No," said the older boy. "Though I have heard that manners make the man. -Where now?" 
"Where you will. I do not know the house." 
Jasper took him down the corridors of the Great House showing him the open courts and the roofed 
halls, the Room of Shelves where the books of lore and rune-tomes were kept, the great Hearth Hall 
where all the school gathered on festival days, and upstairs, in the towers and under the roofs, the small 
cells where the students and Masters slept. Ged's was in the South Tower, with a window looking down 
over the steep roofs of Thwil town to the sea. Like the other sleeping-cells it had no furnishing but a 
strawfilled mattress in the corner. "We live very plain here," said Jasper. "But I expect you won't mind 
that." 
"I'm used to it." Presently, trying to show himself an equal of this polite disdainful youth, he added, 
"I suppose you weren't, when you first came." 
Jasper looked at him, and his look said without words, "What could you possibly know about what 
I, son of the Lord of the Domain of Eolg on the Isle of Havnor, am or am not used to?" What Jasper said 
aloud was simply, "Come on this way." 
A gong had been rung while they were upstairs, and they came down to eat the noon meal at the 
Long Table of the refectory, along with a hundred or more boys and young men. Each waited on 
himself, joking with the cooks through the window-hatches of the kitchen that opened into the refectory, 
loading his plate from great bowls of food that steamed on the sills, sitting where be pleased at the Long 
Table. "They say," Jasper told Ged, "that no matter how many sit at this table, there is always room." 
Certainly there was room both for many noisy groups of boys talking and eating mightily, and for older 
fellows, their grey cloaks clasped with silver at the neck, who sat more quietly by pairs or alone, with 
grave, pondering faces, as if they had much to think about. Jasper took Ged to sit with a heavyset fellow 
called Vetch, who said nothing much but shovelled in his food with a will. He had the accent of the East 
Reach, and was very dark of skin, not red-brown like Ged and Jasper and most folk of the Archipelago, 
but black-brown. He was plain, and his manners were not polished. He grumbled about the dinner when 
he had finished it, but then turning to Ged said, "At least it's not illusion, like so much around here; it 
sticks to your ribs." Ged did not know what he meant, but he felt a certain liking for him, and was glad 
when after the meal he stayed with them. 
They went down into the town, that Ged might learn his way about it. Few and short as were the 
streets of Thwil, they turned and twisted curiously among the high-roofed houses, and the way was easy 
to lose. It was a strange town, and strange also its people, fishermen and workmen and artisans like any 
others, but so used to the sorcery that is ever at play on the Isle of the Wise that they seemed half 
sorcerers themselves. They talked (as Ged had learned) in riddles, and not one of them would blink to 
see a boy turn into a fish or a house fly up into the air, but knowing it for a schoolboy prank would go on 
cobbling shoes or cutting up mutton, unconcerned. 
Coming up past the Back Door and around through the gardens of the Great House, the three boys 
crossed the clear-running Thwilburn on a wooden bridge and went on northward among woods and 
pastures. The path climbed and wound. They passed oakgroves where shadows lay thick for all the 
brightness of the sun. There was one grove not far away to the left that Ged could never quite see 
plainly. The path never reached it, though it always seemed to be about to. He could not even make out 
what kind of trees they were. Vetch, seeing him gazing, said softly, "That is the Immanent Grove. We 

can't come there, yet... " 
In the hot sunlit pastures yellow flowers bloomed. "Sparkweed," .said Jasper. "They grow where 
the wind dropped the ashes of burning Ilien, when Erreth-Akbe defended the Inward Isles from the 
Firelord." He blew on a withered flowerhead, and the seeds shaken loose went up on the wind like 
sparks of fire in the sun. 
The path led them up and around the base of a great green hill, round and treeless, the hill that Ged 
had seen from the ship as they entered the charmed waters of Roke Island. On the hillside Jasper halted. 
"At home in Havnor I heard much about Gontish wizardry, and always in praise, so that I've wanted for 
a long time to see the manner of it. Here now we have a Gontishman; and we stand on the slopes of 
Roke Knoll, whose roots go down to the center of the earth. All spells are strong here. Play us a trick, 
Sparrowhawk. Show us your style." 
Ged, confused and taken aback, said nothing. 
"Later on, Jasper," Vetch said in his plain way. "Let him be a while." 
"He has either skill or power, or the doorkeeper wouldn't have let him in. Why shouldn't he show it, 
now as well as later? Right, Sparrowhawk?" 
"I have both skill and power," Ged said. "Show me what kind of thing you're talking about." 
"Illusions, of course - tricks, games of seeming. Like this!" 
Pointing his finger Jasper spoke a few strange words, and where he pointed on the hillside among 
the green grasses a little thread of water trickled, and grew, and now a spring gushed out and the water 
went running down the hill. Ged put his hand in the stream and it felt wet, drank of it and it was cool. 
Yet for all that it would quench no thirst, being but illusion. Jasper with another word stopped the water, 
and the grasses waved dry in the sunlight. "Now you, Vetch," he said with his cool smile. 
Vetch scratched his head and looked glum, but he took up a bit of earth in his hand and began to 
sing tunelessly over it, molding it with his dark fingers and shaping it, pressing it, stroking it: and 
suddenly it was a small creature like a bumblebee or furry fly, that flew humming off over Roke Knoll, 
and vanished. 
Ged stood staring, crestfallen. What did he know but mere village witchery, spells to call goats, 
cure warts, move loads or mend pots? 
"I do no such tricks as these," he said. That was enough for Vetch, who was for going on; but 
Jasper said, "Why don't you?" 
"Sorcery is not a game. We Gontishmen do not play it for pleasure or praise," Ged answered 
haughtily. 
"What do you play it for," Jasper inquired, "-money?" 
"No!-" But he could not think of anything more to say that would hide his ignorance and save his 
pride. Jasper laughed, not ill-humoredly, and went on, leading them on around Roke Knoll. And Ged 
followed, sullen and sorehearted, knowing he had behaved like a fool, and blaming Jasper for it. 
That night as he lay wrapped in his cloak on the mattress in his cold unlit cell of stone, in the utter 
silence of the Great House of Roke, the strangeness of the place and the thought of all the spells and 
sorceries that had been worked there began to come over him heavily. Darkness surrounded him, dread 
filled him. He wished he were anywhere else but Roke. But Vetch came to the door, a little bluish ball of 
werelight nodding over his head to light the way, and asked if be could come in and talk a while. He 
asked Ged about Gont, and then spoke fondly of his own home isles of the East Reach, telling how the 
smoke of village hearthfires is blown across that quiet sea at evening between the small islands with 

funny names: Korp, Kopp, and Holp, Venway and Vemish, Ifiish, Koppish, and Sneg. When he 
sketched the shapes of those lands on the stones of the floor with his finger to show Ged how they lay, 
the lines he drew shone dim as if drawn with a stick of silver for a while before they faded. Vetch had 
been three years at the School, and soon would be made Sorcerer; he thought no more of performing the 
lesser arts of magic than a bird thinks of flying. Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was 
the art of kindness. That night, and always from then on, he offered and gave Ged friendship, a sure and 
open friendship which Ged could not help but return. 
Yet Vetch was also friendly to Jasper, who had made Ged into a fool that first day on Roke Knoll. 
Ged would not forget this, nor, it seemed, would Jasper, who always spoke to him with a polite voice 
and a mocking smile. Ged's pride would not be slighted or condescended to. He swore to prove to 
Jasper, and to all the rest of them among whom Jasper was something of a leader, how great his power 
really was - some day. For none of them, for all their clever tricks, had saved a village by wizardry. Of 
none of them had Ogion written that he would be the greatest wizard of Gont. 
So bolstering up his pride, he set all his strong will on the work they gave him, the lessons and 
crafts and histories and skills taught by the grey-cloaked Masters of Roke, who were called the Nine. 
Part of each day he studied with the Master Chanter, learning the Deeds of heroes and the Lays of 
wisdom, beginning with the oldest of all songs, the Creation of Ea. Then with a dozen other lads he 
would practice with the Master Windkey at arts of wind and weather. Whole bright days of spring and 
early summer they spent out in Roke Bay in light catboats, practising steering by word, and stilling 
waves, and speaking to the world's wind, and raising up the magewind. These are very intricate skills, 
and frequently Ged's head got whacked by the swinging boom as the boat jibed under a wind suddenly 
blowing backwards, or his boat and another collided though they had the whole bay to navigate in, or all 
three boys in his boat went swimming unexpectedly as the boat was swamped by a huge, unintended 
wave. There were quieter expeditions ashore, other days, with the Master Herbal who taught the ways 
and properties of things that grow; and the Master Hand taught sleight and jugglery and the lesser arts of 
Changing. 
At all these studies Ged was apt, and within a month was bettering lads who had been a year at 
Roke before him. Especially the tricks of illusion came to him so easily that it seemed he had been born 
knowing them and needed only to be reminded. The Master Hand was a gentle and lighthearted old man, 
who had endless delight in the wit and beauty of the crafts he taught; Ged soon felt no awe of him, but 
asked him for this spell and that spell, and always the Master smiled and showed him what he wanted. 
But one day, having it in mind to put Jasper to shame at last, Ged said to the Master Hand in the Court of 
Seeming, "Sir, all these charms are much the same; knowing one, you know them all. And as soon as the 
spell-weaving ceases, the illusion vanishes. Now if I make a pebble into a diamond-" and he did so with 
a word and a flick of his wrist "what must I do to make that diamond remain diamond? How is the 
changing-spell locked, and made to last?" 
The Master Hand looked at the jewel that glittered on Ged's palm, bright as the prize of a dragon's 
hoard. The old Master murmured one word, "Tolk," and there lay the pebble, no jewel but a rough grey 
bit of rock. The Master took it and held it out on his own hand. "This is a rock; tolk in the True Speech," 
he said, looking mildly up at Ged now. "A bit of the stone of which Roke Isle is made, a little bit of the 
dry land on which men live. It is itself. It is part of the world. By the Illusion-Change you can make it 
look like a diamond -or a flower or a fly or an eye or a flame-" The rock flickered from shape to shape as 
he named them, and returned to rock. "But that is mere seeming. Illusion fools the beholder's senses; it 

makes him see and hear and feel that the thing is changed. But it does not change the thing. To change 
this rock into a jewel, you must change its true name. And to do that, my son, even to so small a scrap of 
the world, is to change the world. It can be done. Indeed it can be done. It is the art of the Master 
Changer, and you will learn it, when you are ready to learn it. But you must not change one thing, one 
pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in 
balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the 
world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To 
light a candle is to cast a shadow..." 
He looked down at the pebble again. "A rock is a good thing, too, you know," he said, speaking less 
gravely. "If the Isles of Eartbsea were all made of diamond, we'd lead a hard life here. Enjoy illusions, 
lad, and let the rocks be rocks." He smiled, but Ged left dissatisfied. Press a mage for his secrets and he 
would always talk, like Ogion, about balance, and danger, and the dark. But surely a wizard, one who 
had gone past these childish tricks of illusion to the true arts of Summoning and Change, was powerful 
enough to do what he pleased, and balance the world as seemed best to him, and drive back darkness 
with his own light. 
In the corridor he met Jasper, who, since Ged's accomplishments began to be praised about the 
School, spoke to him in a way that seemed more friendly, but was more scoffing. "You look gloomy, 
Sparrowhawk," he said now, "did your juggling-charms go wrong?" 
Seeking as always to put himself on equal footing with Jasper, Ged answered the question ignoring 
its ironic tone. "I'm sick of juggling," he said, "sick of these illusion-tricks, fit only to amuse idle lords in 
their castles and Domains. The only true magic they've taught me yet on Roke is making werelight, and 
some weatherworking. The rest is mere foolery." 
"Even foolery is dangerous," said Jasper, "in the hands of a fool." 
At that Ged turned as if he had been slapped, and took a step towards Jasper; but the older boy 
smiled as if he had not intended any insult, nodded his head in his stiff, graceful way, and went on. 
Standing there with rage in his heart, looking after Jasper, Ged swore to himself to outdo his rival, 
and not in some mere illusion-match but in a test of power. He would prove himself, and humiliate 
Jasper. He would not let the fellow stand there looking down at him, graceful, disdainful, hateful. 
Ged did not stop to think why Jasper might hate him. He only knew why he hated Jasper. The other 
prentices had soon learned they could seldom match themselves against Ged either in sport or in earnest, 
and they said of him, some in praise and some in spite, "He's a wizard born, he'll never let you beat 
him." Jasper alone neither praised him nor avoided him, but simply looked down at him, smiling 
slightly. And therefore Jasper stood alone as his rival, who must be put to shame. 
He did not see, or would not see, that in this rivalry, which he clung to and fostered as part of his 
own pride, there was anything of the danger, the darkness, of which the Master Hand had mildly warned 
him. 
When he was not moved by pure rage, he knew very well that he was as yet no match for Jasper, or 
any of the older boys, and so he kept at his work and went on as usual. At the end of summer the work 
was slackened somewhat, so there was more time for sport: spell-boat races down in the harbor, feats of 
illusion in the courts of the Great House, and in the long evenings, in the groves, wild games of hide-andseek 
where hiders and seeker were both invisible and only voices moved laughing and calling among the 
trees, following and dodging the quick, faint werelights. Then as autumn came they set to their tasks 
afresh, practising new magic. So Ged's first months at Roke went by fast, full of passions and wonders. 

 In winter it was different. He was sent with seven other boys across Roke Island to the farthest 
northmost cape, where stands the Isolate Tower. There by himself lived the Master Namer, who was 
called by a name that had no meaning in any language, Kurremkarmerruk. No farm or dwelling lay 
within miles of the Tower. Grim it stood above the northern cliffs, grey were the clouds over the seas of 
winter, endless the lists and ranks and rounds of names that the Namer's eight pupils must learn. 
Amongst them in the Tower's high room Kurremkarmerruk sat on a high seat, writing down lists of 
names that must be learned before the ink faded at midnight leaving the parchment blank again. It was 
cold and half-dark and always silent there except for the scratching of the Master's pen and the sighing, 
maybe, of a student who must learn before midnight the name of every cape, point, bay, sound, inlet, 
channel, harbor, shallows, reef and rock of the shores of Lossow, a little islet of the Pelnish Sea. If the 
student complained the Master might say nothing, but lengthen the list; or he might say, "He who would 
be Seamaster must know the true name of every drop of water in the sea." 
Ged sighed sometimes, but he did not complain. He saw that in this dusty and fathomless matter of 
learning the true name of every place, thing, and being, the power he wanted lay like a jewel at the 
bottom of a dry well. For magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing. So Kurremkarmerruk had 
said to them, once, their first night in the Tower; he never repeated it, but Ged did not forget his words. 
"Many a mage of great power," he had said, "has spent his whole life to find out the name of one single 
thing - one single lost or hidden name. And still the lists are not finished. Nor will they be, till world's 
end. Listen, and you will see why. In the world under the sun, and in the other world that has no sun, 
there is much that has nothing to do with men and men's speech, and there are powers beyond our 
power. But magic, true magic, is worked only by those beings who speak the Hardic tongue of Earthsea, 
or the Old Speech from which it grew. 
"That is the language dragons speak, and the language Segoy spoke who made the islands of the 
world, and the language of our lays and songs, spells, enchantments, and invocations. Its words lie 
hidden and changed among our Hardic words. We call the foam on waves sukien: that word is made 
from two words of the Old Speech, suk, feather, and inien, the sea. Feather of the sea, is foam. But you 
cannot charm the foam calling it sukien; you must use its own true name in the Old Speech, which is 
essa. Any witch knows a few of these words in the Old Speech, and a mage knows many. But there are 
many more, and some have been lost over the ages, and some have been hidden, and some are known 
only to dragons and to the Old Powers of Earth, and some are known to no living creature; and no man 
could learn them all. For there is no end to that language. 
"Here is the reason. The sea's name is inien, well and good. But what we call the Inmost Sea has its 
own name also in the Old Speech. Since no thing can have two true names, inien can mean only `all the 
sea except the Inmost Sea.' And of course it does not mean even that, for there are seas and bays and 
straits beyond counting that bear names of their own. So if some Mage-Seamaster were mad enough to 
try to lay a spell of storm or calm over all the ocean, his spell must say not only that word inien, but the 
name of every stretch and bit and part of the sea through all the Archipelago and all the Outer Reaches 
and beyond to where names cease. Thus, that which gives us the power to work magic, sets the limits of 
that power. A mage can control only what is near him, what he can name exactly and wholly. And this is 
well. If it were not so, the wickedness of the powerful or the folly of the wise would long ago have 
sought to change what cannot be changed, and Equilibrium would fail. The unbalanced sea would 
overwhelm the islands where we perilously dwell, and in the old silence all voices and all names would 
be lost." 

 Ged thought long on these words, and they went deep in his understanding. Yet the majesty of the 
task could not make the work of that long year in the Tower less hard and dry; and at the end of the year 
Kurremkarmerruk said to him, "You have made a good beginning." But no more. Wizards speak truth, 
and it was true that all the mastery of Names that Ged had toiled to win that year was the mere start of 
what he must go on learning all his life. He was let go from the Isolate Tower sooner than those who had 
come with him, for he had learned quicker; but that was all the praise he got. 
He walked south across the island alone in the early winter, along townless empty roads. As night 
came on it rained. He said no charm to keep the rain off him, for the weather of Roke was in the hands 
of the Master Windkey and might not be tampered with. He took shelter under a great pendick-tree, and 
lying there wrapped in his cloak he thought of his old master Ogion, who might still be on his autumn 
wanderings over the heights of Gont, sleeping out with leafless branches for a roof and falling rain for 
housewalls. That made Ged smile, for he found the thought of Ogion always a comfort to him. He fell 
asleep with a peaceful heart, there in the cold darkness full of the whisper of water. At dawn waking he 
lifted his head; the rain had ceased; he saw, sheltered in the folds of his cloak, a little animal curled up 
asleep which had crept there for warmth. He wondered, seeing it, for it was a rare strange beast, an otak. 
These creatures are found only on four southern isles of the Archipelago, Roke, Ensmer, Pody and 
Wathort. They are small and sleek, with broad faces, and fur dark brown or brindle, and great bright 
eyes. Their teeth are cruel and their temper fierce, so they are not made pets of. They have no call or cry 
or any voice. Ged stroked this one, and it woke and yawned, showing a small brown tongue and white 
teeth, but it was not afraid. "Otak," he said, and then remembering the thousand names of beasts he had 
learned in the Tower he called it by its true name in the Old Speech, "Hoeg! Do you want to come with 
me?" 
The otak sat itself down on his open hand, and began to wash its fur. 
He put it up on his shoulder in the folds of his hood, and there it rode. Sometimes during the day it 
jumped down and darted off into the woods, but it always came back to him, once with a woodmouse it 
had caught. He laughed and told it to eat the mouse, for he was fasting, this night being the Festival of 
Sunreturn. So he came in the wet dusk past Roke Knoll, and saw bright werelights playing in the rain 
over the roofs of the Great House, and he entered there and was welcomed by his Masters and 
companions in the firelit hall. 
It was like a homecoming to Ged, who had no home to which he could ever return. He was happy 
to see so many faces he knew, and happiest to see Vetch come forward to greet him with a wide smile 
on his dark face. He had missed his friend this year more than he knew. Vetch had been made sorcerer 
this fall and was a prentice no more, but that set no barrier between them. They fell to talking at once, 
and it seemed to Ged that he said more to Vetch in that first hour than he had said during the whole long 
year at the Isolate Tower. 
The otak still rode his shoulder, nestling in the fold of his hood as they sat at dinner at long tables 
set up for the festival in the Hearth Hall. Vetch marvelled at the little creature, and once put up his hand 
to stroke it, but the otak snapped its sharp teeth at him. He laughed. "They say, Sparrowhawk, that a man 
favored by a wild beast is a man to whom the Old Powers of stone and spring will speak in human 
voice." 
"They say Gontish wizards often keep familiars," said Jasper, who sat on the other side of Vetch. 
"Our Lord Nemmerle has his raven, and songs say the Red Mage of Ark led a wild boar on a gold chain. 
But I never heard of any sorcerer keeping a rat in his hood!" 

 At that they all laughed, and Ged laughed with them. It was a merry night and he was joyful to be 
there in the warmth and merriment, keeping festival with his companions. But, like all Jasper ever said 
to him, the jest set his teeth on edge. 
That night the Lord of O was a guest of the school, himself a sorcerer of renown. He had been a 
pupil of the Archmage, and returned sometimes to Roke for the Winter Festival or the Long Dance in 
summer. With him was his lady, slender and young, bright as new copper, her black hair crowned with 
opals. It was seldom that any woman sat in the halls of the Great House, and some of the old Masters 
looked at her sidelong, disapproving. But the young men looked at her with all their eyes. 
"For such a one," said Vetch to Ged, "I could work vast enchantments..." He sighed, and laughed. 
"She's only a woman," Ged replied. 
"The Princess Elfarran was only a woman," said Vetch, "and for her sake all Enlad was laid waste, 
and the Hero-Mage of Havnor died, and the island Solea sank beneath the sea." 
"Old tales," says Ged. But then he too began to look at the Lady of O, wondering if indeed this was 
such mortal beauty as the old tales told of. 
The Master Chanter had sung the Deed of the Young King, and all together had sung the Winter 
Carol. Now when there was a little pause before they all rose from the tables, Jasper got up and went to 
the table nearest the hearth, where the Archmage and the guests and Masters sat, and he spoke, to the 
Lady of O. Jasper was no longer a boy but a young man, tall and comely, with his cloak clasped at the 
neck with silver; for he also had been made sorcerer this year, and the silver clasp was the token of it. 
The lady smiled at what he said and the opals shone in her black hair, radiant. Then, the Masters 
nodding benign consent, Jasper worked an illusion-charm for her. A white tree he made spring up from 
the stone floor. Its branches touched the high roofbeams of the hall, and on every twig of every branch a 
golden apple shone, each a sun, for it was the Year-Tree. A bird flew among the branches suddenly, all 
white with a tail like a fall of snow, and the golden apples dimming turned to seeds, each one a drop of 
crystal. These falling from the tree with a sound like rain, all at once there came a sweet fragrance, while 
the tree, swaying, put forth leaves of rosy fire and white flowers like stars. So the illusion faded. The 
Lady of O cried out with pleasure, and bent her shining head to the young sorcerer in praise of his 
mastery. "Come with us, live with us in O-tokne - can he not come, my lord?" she asked, childlike, of 
her stern husband. But Jasper said only, "When I have learned skills worthy of my Masters here and 
worthy of your praise, my lady, then I will gladly come, and serve you ever gladly." 
So. he pleased all there, except Ged. Ged joined his voice to the praises, but not his heart. "I could 
have done better," he said to himself, in bitter envy; and all the joy of the evening was darkened for him, 
after that. 
------ 
4 The Loosing of the Shadow 
------ 
That spring Ged saw little of either Vetch or Jasper, for they being sorcerers studied now with the 
Master Patterner in the secrecy of the Immanent Grove, where no prentice might set foot. Ged stayed in 
the Great House, working with the Masters at all the skills practised by sorcerers, those who work magic 
but carry no staff: windbringing, weatherworking, finding and binding, and the arts of spellsmiths and 

spellwrights, tellers, chanters, healalls and herbalists. At night alone in his sleeping-cell, a little ball of 
werelight burning above the book in place of lamp or candle, he studied the Further Runes and the 
Runes of Ea, which are used in the Great Spells. All these crafts came easy to him, and it was rumored 
among the students that this Master or that had said that the Gontish lad was the quickest student that 
had ever been at Roke, and tales grew up concerning the otak, which was said to be a disguised spirit 
who whispered wisdom in Ged's ear, and it was even said that the Archmage's raven had hailed Ged at 
his arrival as "Archmage to be." Whether or not they believed such stories, and whether or not they liked 
Ged, most of his companions admired him, and were eager to follow him when the rare wild mood came 
over him and he joined them to lead their games on the lengthening evenings of spring. But for the most 
part he was all work and pride and temper, and held himself apart. Among them all, Vetch being absent, 
he had no friend, and never knew he wanted one. 
He was fifteen, very young to learn any of the High Arts of wizard or mage, those who carry the 
staff; but he was so quick to learn all the arts of illusion that the Master Changer, himself a young man, 
soon began to teach him apart from the others, and to tell him about the true Spells of Shaping. He 
explained how, if a thing is really to be changed into another thing, it must be renamed for as long as the 
spell lasts, and he told how this affects the names and natures of things surrounding the transformed 
thing. He spoke of the perils of changing, above all when the wizard transforms his own shape and thus 
is liable to be caught in his own spell. Little by little, drawn on by the boy's sureness of understanding, 
the young Master began to do more than merely tell him of these mysteries. He taught him first one and 
then another of the Great Spells of Change, and he gave him the Book of Shaping to study. This he did 
without knowledge of the Archmage, and unwisely, yet he meant no harm. 
Ged worked also with the Master Summoner now, but that Master was a stern man, aged and 
hardened by the deep and somber wizardry he taught. He dealt with no illusion, only true magic, the 
summoning of such energies as light, and heat, and the force that draws the magnet, and those forces 
men perceive as weight, form, color, sound: real powers, drawn from the immense fathomless energies 
of the universe, which no man's spells or uses could exhaust or unbalance. The weatherworker's and 
seamaster's calling upon wind and water were crafts already known to his pupils, but it was he who 
showed them why the true wizard uses such spells only at need, since to summon up such earthly forces 
is to change the earth of which they are a part. "Rain on Roke may be drouth in Osskil," he said, "and a 
calm in the East Reach may be storm and ruin in the West, unless you know what you are about." 
As for the calling of real things and living people, and the raising up of spirits of the dead, and the 
invocations of the Unseen, those spells which are the height of the Summoner's art and the mage's 
power, those he scarcely spoke of to them. Once or twice Ged tried to lead him to talk a little of such 
mysteries, but the Master was silent, looking at him long and grimly, till Ged grew uneasy and said no 
more. 
Sometimes indeed he was uneasy working even such lesser spells as the Summoner taught him. 
There were certain runes on certain pages of the Lore-Book that seemed familiar to him, though he did 
not remember in what book he had ever seen them before. There were certain phrases that must be said 
in spells of Summoning that he did not like to say. They made him think, for an instant, of shadows in a 
dark room, of a shut door and shadows reaching out to him from the corner by the door. Hastily he put 
such thoughts or memories aside and went on. These moments of fear and darkness, he said to himself, 
were the shadows merely of his ignorance. The more he learned, the less he would have to fear, until 
finally in his full power as Wizard he needed fear nothing in the world, nothing at all. 

 In the second month of that summer all the school gathered again at the Great House to celebrate 
the Moon's Night and the Long Dance, which that year fell together as one festival of two nights, which 
happens but once in fifty-two years. All the first night, the shortest night of full moon of the year, flutes 
played out in the fields, and the narrow streets of Thwil were full of drums and torches, and the sound of 
singing went out over the moonlit waters of Roke Bay. As the sun rose next morning the Chanters of 
Roke began to sing the long Deed of Erreth-Akbe,which tells how the white towers of Havnor were 
built, and of Erreth-Akbe's journeys from the Old Island, Ea, through all the Archipelago and the 
Reaches, until at last in the uttermost West Reach on the edge of the Open Sea he met the dragon Orm; 
and his bones in shattered armor lie among the dragon's bones on the shore of lonely Selidor, but his 
sword set atop the highest tower of Havnor still burns red in the sunset above the Inmost Sea. When the 
chant was finished the Long Dance began. Townsfolk and Masters and students and farmers all together, 
men and women, danced in the warm dust and dusk down all the roads of Roke to the sea-beaches, to 
the beat of drums and drone of pipes and flutes. Straight out into the sea they danced, under the moon 
one night past full, and the music was lost in the breakers' sound. As the east grew light they came back 
up the beaches and the roads, the drums silent and only the flutes playing soft and shrill. So it was done 
on every island of the Archipelago that night: one dance, one music binding together the sea-divided 
lands. 
When the Long Dance was over most people slept the day away, and gathered again at evening to 
eat and drink. There was a group of young fellows, prentices and sorcerers, who had brought their 
supper out from the refectory to hold private feast in a courtyard of the Great House: Vetch, Jasper, and 
Ged were there, and six or seven others, and some young lads released briefly from the Isolate Tower, 
for this festival had brought even Kurremkarmerruk out. They were all eating and laughing and playing 
such tricks out of pure frolic as might be the marvel of a king's court. One boy had lighted the court with 
a hundred stars of werelight, colored like jewels, that swung in a slow netted procession between them 
and the real stars; and a pair of boys were playing bowls with balls of green flame and bowling-pins that 
leaped and hopped away as the ball came near; and all the while Vetch sat crosslegged, eating roast 
chicken; up in mid-air. One of the younger boys tried to pull him down to earth, but Vetch merely 
drifted up a little higher, out of reach, and sat calmly smiling on the air. Now and then he tossed away a 
chicken bone, which turned to an owl and flew hooting among the netted star-lights. Ged shot 
breadcrumb arrows after the owls and brought them down, and when they touched the ground there they 
lay, bone and crumb, all illusion gone. Ged also tried to join Vetch up in the middle of the air, but 
lacking the key of the spell he had to flap his arms to keep aloft, and they were all laughing at his flights 
and flaps and bumps. He kept up his foolishness for the laughter's sake, laughing with them, for after 
those two long nights of dance and moonlight and music and magery he was in a fey and wild mood, 
ready for whatever might come. 
He came lightly down on his feet just beside Jasper at last, and Jasper, who never laughed aloud, 
moved away saying, "The Sparrowhawk that can't fly..." 
"Is Jasper a precious stone?" Ged returned, grinning. "O jewel among sorcerers, O Gem of Havnor, 
sparkle for us!" 
The lad that had set the lights dancing sent one down to dance and glitter about Jasper's head. Not 
quite as cool as usual, frowning, Jasper brushed the light away and snuffed it out with one gesture. "I am 
sick of boys and noise and foolishness," he said. 
"You're getting middle-aged, lad," Vetch remarked from above. 

 "If silence and gloom is what you want," put in one of the younger boys, "you could always try the 
Tower." 
Ged said to him, "What is it you want, then, Jasper?" 
"I want the company of my equals," Jasper said. "Come on, Vetch. Leave the prentices to their 
toys." 
Ged turned to face Jasper. "What do sorcerers have that prentices lack?" he inquired. His voice was 
quiet, but all the other boys suddenly fell still, for in his tone as in Jasper's the spite between them now 
sounded plain and clear as steel coming out of a sheath. 
"Power," Jasper said. 
"I'll match your power act for act." 
"You challenge me?" 
"I challenge you." 
Vetch had dropped down to the ground, and now he came between them, grim of face. "Duels in 
sorcery are forbidden to us, and well you know it. Let this cease!" 
Both Ged and Jasper stood silent, for it was true they knew the law of Roke, and they also knew 
that Vetch was moved by love, and themselves by hate. Yet their anger was balked, not cooled. 
Presently, moving a little aside as if to be heard by Vetch alone, Jasper spoke, with his cool smile: "I 
think you'd better remind your goatherd friend again of the law that protects him. He looks sulky. I 
wonder, did he really think I'd accept a challenge from him? a fellow who smells of goats, a prentice 
who doesn't know the First Change?" 
"Jasper," said Ged, "What do you know of what I know?" 
For an instant, with no word spoken that any heard, Ged vanished from their sight, and where he 
had stood a great falcon hovered, opening its hooked beak to scream: for one instant, and then Ged stood 
again in the flickering torchlight, his dark gaze on Jasper. 
Jasper had taken a step backward, in astonishment; but now he shrugged and said one word: 
"Illusion." 
The others muttered. Vetch said, "That was not illusion. It was true change. And enough. Jasper, 
listen-" 
"Enough to prove that he sneaked a look in the Book of Shaping behind the Master's back: what 
then? Go on, Goatherd. I like this trap you're building for yourself. The more you try to prove yourself 
my equal, the more you show yourself for what you are." 
At that, Vetch turned from Jasper, and said very softly to Ged, "Sparrowhawk, will you be a man 
and drop this now - come with me-" 
Ged looked at his friend and smiled, but all he said was, "Keep Hoeg for me a little while, will 
you?" He put into Vetch's hands the little otak, which as usual had been riding on his shoulder. It had 
never let any but Ged touch it, but it came to Vetch now, and climbing up his arm cowered on his 
shoulder, its great bright eyes always on its master. 
"Now," Ged said to Jasper, quietly as before, what are you going to do to prove yourself my 
superior, Jasper?" 
I don't have to do anything, Goatherd. Yet I will. I will give you a chance - an opportunity. Envy 
eats you like a worm in an apple. Let's let out the worm. Once by Roke Knoll you boasted that Gontish 
wizards don't play games. Come to Roke Knoll now and show us what it is they do instead. And 
afterward, maybe I will show you a little sorcery." 

 "Yes, I should like to see that," Ged answered. The younger boys, used to seeing his black temper 
break out at the least hint of slight or insult, watched him in wonder at his coolness now. Vetch watched 
him not in wonder, but with growing fear. He tried to intervene again, but Jasper said, "Come, keep out 
of this, Vetch. What will you do with the chance I give you, Goatherd? Will you show us an illusion, a 
fireball, a charm to cure goats with the mange?" 
"What would you like me to do, Jasper?" 
The older lad shrugged, "Summon up a spirit from the dead, for all I care!" 
"I will." 
"You will not" Jasper looked straight at him, rage suddenly flaming out over his disdain. "You will 
not. You cannot. You brag and brag-" 
"By my name, I will do it!" 
They all stood utterly motionless for a moment. 
Breaking away from Vetch who would have held him back by main force, Ged strode out of the 
courtyard, not looking back. The dancing werelights overhead died out, sinking down. Jasper hesitated a 
second, then followed after Ged. An the rest came straggling behind, in silence, curious and afraid. 
The slopes of Roke Knoll went up dark into the darkness of summer night before moonrise. The 
presence of that hill where many wonders had been worked was heavy, like a weight in the air about 
them. As they came onto the hillside they thought of how the roots of it were deep, deeper than the sea, 
reaching down even to the old, blind, secret fires at the world's core. They stopped on the east slope. 
Stars hung over the black grass above them on the hill's crest. No wind blew. 
Ged went a few paces up the slope away from the others and turning said in a clear voice, "Jasper! 
Whose spirit shall I call?" 
"Call whom you like. None will listen to you." Jasper's voice shook a little, with anger perhaps. 
Ged answered him softly, mockingly, "Are you afraid?" 
He did not even listen for Jasper's reply, if he made one. He no longer cared about Jasper. Now that 
they stood on Roke Knoll, hate and rage were gone, replaced by utter certainty. He need envy no one. 
He knew that his power, this night, on this dark enchanted ground, was greater than it had ever been, 
filling him till be trembled with the sense of strength barely kept in check. He knew now that Jasper was 
far beneath him, had been sent perhaps only to bring him here tonight, no rival but a mere servant of 
Ged's destiny. Under his feet he felt the hillroots going down and down into the dark, and over his head 
he saw the dry, far fires of the stars. Between, all things were his to order, to command. He stood at the 
center of the world. 
"Don't be afraid," he said, smiling. "I'll call a woman's spirit. You need not fear a woman. Elfarran I 
will call, the fair lady of the Deed of Enlad." 
"She died a thousand years ago, her bones lie afar under the Sea of Ea, and maybe there never was 
such a woman." 
"Do years and distances matter to the dead? Do the Songs lie?" Ged said with the same gentle 
mockery, and then saying, "Watch the air between my hands," he turned away from the others and stood 
still. 
In a great slow gesture he stretched out his arms, the gesture of welcome that opens an invocation. 
He began to speak. 
He had read the runes of this Spell of Summoning in Ogion's book, two years and more ago, and 

never since had seen them. In darkness he had read them then. Now in this darkness it was as if he read 
them again on the page open before him in the night. But now he understood what he read, speaking it 
aloud word after word, and he saw the markings of how the spell must be woven with the sound of the 
voice and the motion of body and hand. 
The other boys stood watching, not speaking, not moving unless they shivered a little: for the great 
spell was beginning to work. Ged's voice was soft still, but changed, with a deep singing in it, and the 
words he spoke were not known to them. He fell silent. Suddenly the wind rose roaring in the grass. Ged 
dropped to his knees and called out aloud. Then he fell forward as if to embrace earth with his 
outstretched arms, and when he rose he held something dark in his straining hands and arms, something 
so heavy that he shook with effort getting to his feet. The hot wind whined in the black tossing grasses 
on the hill. If the stars shone now none saw them. 
The words of the enchantment hissed and mumbled on Ged's lips, and then he cried out aloud and 
clearly, "Elfarran!" 
Again he cried the name, "Elfarran!" 
The shapeless mass of darkness he had lifted split apart. It sundered, and a pale spindle of light 
gleamed between his opened arms, a faint oval reaching from the ground up to the height of his raised 
hands. In the oval of light for a moment there moved a form, a human shape: a tall woman looking back 
over her shoulder. Her face was beautiful, and sorrowful, and full of fear. 
Only for a moment did the spirit glimmer there. Then the sallow oval between Ged's arms grew 
bright. It widened and spread, a rent in the darkness of the earth and night, a ripping open of the fabric of 
the world. Through it blazed a terrible brightness. And through that bright misshapen breach clambered 
something like a clot of black shadow, quick and hideous, and it leaped straight out at Ged's face. 
Staggering back under the weight of the thing, Ged gave a short, hoarse scream. The little otak 
watching from Vetch's shoulder, the animal that had no voice, screamed aloud also and leaped as if to 
attack. 
Ged fell, struggling and writhing, while the bright rip in the world's darkness above him widened 
and stretched. The boys that watched fled, and Jasper bent down to the ground hiding his eyes from the 
terrible light. Vetch alone ran forward to his friend. So only he saw the lump of shadow that clung to 
Ged, tearing at his flesh. It was like a black beast, the size of a young child, though it seemed to swell 
and shrink; and it had no head or face, only the four taloned paws with which it gripped and tore. Vetch 
sobbed with horror, yet he put out his hands to try to pull the thing away from Ged. Before he touched it, 
he was bound still, unable to move. 
The intolerable brightness faded, and slowly the torn edges of the world closed together. Nearby a 
voice was speaking as softly as a tree whispers or a fountain plays. 
Starlight began to shine again, and the grasses of the hillside were whitened with the light of the 
moon just rising. The night was healed. Restored and steady lay the balance of light and dark. The 
shadow-beast was gone. Ged lay sprawled on his back, his arms flung out as if they yet kept the wide 
gesture of welcome and invocation. His face was blackened with blood and there were great black stains 
on his shirt. The little otak cowered by his shoulder, quivering. And above him stood an old man whose 
cloak glimmered pale in the moonrise: the Archmage Nemmerle. 
The end of Nemmerle's staff hovered silvery above Ged's breast. Once gently it touched him over 
the heart, once on the lips, while Nemmerle whispered. Ged stirred, and his lips parted gasping for 
breath. Then the old Archmage lifted the staff, and set it to earth, and leaned heavily on it with bowed 

head, as if he had scarcely strength to stand. 
Vetch found himself free to move. Looking around, he saw that already others were there, the 
Masters Summoner and Changer. An act of great wizardry is not worked without arousing such men, 
and they had ways of coming very swiftly when need called, though none had been so swift as the 
Archmage. They now sent for help, and some who came went with the Archmage, while others, Vetch 
among them, carried Ged to the chambers of the Master Herbal. 
All night long the Summoner stayed on Roke Knoll, keeping watch. Nothing stirred there on the 
hillside where the stuff of the world had been torn open. No shadow came crawling through moonlight 
seeking the rent through which it might clamber back into its own domain. It had fled from Nemmerle, 
and from the mighty spell-walls that surround and protect Roke Island, but it was in the world now. In 
the world, somewhere, it hid. If Ged had died that night it might have tried to find the doorway he had 
opened, and follow him into death's realm, or slip back into whatever place it had come from; for this the 
Summoner waited on Roke Knoll. But Ged lived. 
They had laid him abed in the healing-chamber, and the Master Herbal tended the wounds he had 
on his face and throat and shoulder. They were deep, ragged, and evil wounds. The black blood in them 
would not stanch, welling out even under the charms and the cobweb-wrapped perriot leaves laid upon 
them. Ged lay blind and dumb in fever like a stick in a slow fire, and there was no spell to cool what 
burned him. 
Not far away, in the unroofed court where the fountain played, the Archmage lay also unmoving, 
but cold, very cold: only his eyes lived, watching the fall of moonlit water and the stir of moonlit leaves. 
Those with him said no spells and worked no healing. Quietly they spoke among themselves from time 
to time, and then turned again to watch their Lord. He lay still, hawk nose and high forehead and white 
hair bleached by moonlight all to the color of bone. To check the ungoverned spell and drive off the 
shadow from Ged, Nemmerle had spent all his power, and with it his bodily strength was gone. He lay 
dying. But the death of a great mage, who has many times in his life walked on the dry steep hillsides of 
death's kingdom, is a strange matter: for the dying man goes not blindly, but surely, knowing the way. 
When Nemmerle looked up through the leaves of the tree, those with him did not know if he watched 
the stars of summer fading in daybreak, or those other stars, which never set above the hills that see no 
dawn. 
The raven of Osskil that had been his pet for thirty years was gone. No one had seen where it went. 
"It flies before him," the Master Patterner said, as they kept vigil. 
The day came warm and clear. The Great House and the streets of Thwil were hushed. No voice 
was raised, until along towards noon iron bells spoke out aloud in the Chanter's Tower, harshly tolling. 
On the next day the Nine Masters of Roke gathered in a place somewhere under the dark trees of 
the Immanent Grove. Even there they set nine walls of silence about them, that no person or power 
might speak to them or hear them as they chose from amongst the mages of all Earthsea him who would 
be the new Archmage. Gensher of Way was chosen. A ship was sent forth at once across the Inmost Sea 
to Way Island to bring the Archmage back to Roke. The Master Windkey stood in the stern and raised 
up the magewind into the sail, and quickly the ship departed, and was gone. 
Of these events Ged knew nothing. For four weeks of that hot summer he lay blind, and deaf, and 
mute, though at times he moaned and cried out like an animal. At last, as the patient crafts of the Master 
Herbal worked their healing, his wounds began to close and the fever left him. Little by little he seemed 
to hear again, though he never spoke. On a clear day of autumn the Master Herbal opened the shutters of 

the room where Ged lay. Since the darkness of that night on Roke Knoll he had known only darkness. 
Now he saw daylight, and the sun shining. He hid his scarred face in his hands and wept. 
Still when winter came he could speak only with a stammering tongue, and the Master Herbal kept 
him there in the healing-chambers, trying to lead his body and mind gradually back to strength. It was 
early spring when at last the Master released him, sending him first to offer his fealty to the Archmage 
Gensher. For he had not been able to join all the others of the School in this duty when Gensher came to 
Roke. 
None of his companions had been allowed to visit him in the months of his sickness, and now as he 
passed some of them asked one another, "Who is that?" He had been light and lithe and strong. Now, 
lamed by pain, he went hesitantly, and did not raise his face, the left side of which was white with scars. 
He avoided those who knew him and those who did not, and made his way straight to the court of the 
Fountain. There where once he had awaited Nemmerle, Gensher awaited him. 
Like the old Archmage the new one was cloaked in white; but like most men of Way and the East 
Reach Gensher was black-skinned, and his look was black, under thick brows. 
Ged knelt and offered him fealty and obedience. Gensher was silent a while. 
"I know what you did," he said at last, "but not what you are. I cannot accept your fealty." 
Ged stood up, and set his hand on the trunk of the young tree beside the fountain to steady himself. 
He was still very slow to find words. "Am I to leave Roke, my lord?" 
"Do you want to leave Roke?" 
"No." 
"What do you want?" 
"To stay. To learn. To undo... the evil..." 
"Nemmerle himself could not do that. -No, I would not let you go from Roke. Nothing protects you 
but the power of the Masters here and the defenses laid upon this island that keep the creatures of evil 
away. If you left now, the thing you loosed would find you at once, and enter into you, and possess you. 
You would be no man but a gebbeth, a puppet doing the will of that evil shadow which you raised up 
into the sunlight. You must stay here, until you gain strength and wisdom enough to defend yourself 
from it - if ever you do. Even now it waits for you. Assuredly it waits for you. Have you seen it since 
that night?" 
"In dreams, lord." After a while Ged went on, speaking with pain and shame, "Lord Gensher, I do 
not know what it was - the thing that came out of the spell and cleaved to me-" 
"Nor do I know. It has no name. You have great power inborn in you, and you used that power 
wrongly, to work a spell over which you had no control, not knowing how that spell affects the balance 
of light and dark, life and death, good and evil. And you were moved to do this by pride and by hate. Is 
it any wonder the result was ruin? You summoned a spirit from the dead, but with it came one of the 
Powers of unlife. Uncalled it came from a place where there are no names. Evil, it wills to work evil 
through you. The power you had to call it gives it power over you: you are connected. It is the shadow of 
your arrogance, the shadow of your ignorance, the shadow you cast. Has a shadow a name?" 
Ged stood sick and haggard. He said at last, "Better I had died." 
"Who are you to judge that, you for whom Nemmerle gave his life? -You are safe here. You will 
live here, and go on with your training. They tell me you were clever. Go on and do your work. Do it 
well. It is all you can do." 
So Gensher ended, and was suddenly gone, as is the way of mages. The fountain leaped in the 

sunlight, and Ged watched it a while and listened to its voice, thinking of Nemmerle. Once in that court 
he had felt himself to be a word spoken by the sunlight. Now the darkness also had spoken: a word that 
could not be unsaid. 
He left the court, going to his old room in the South Tower, which they had kept empty for him. He 
stayed there alone. When the gong called to supper he went, but he would hardly speak to the other lads 
at the Long Table, or raise his face to them, even those who greeted him most gently. So after a day or 
two they all left him alone. To be alone was his desire, for he feared the evil he might do or say 
unwittingly. 
Neither Vetch nor Jasper was there, and he did not ask about them. The boys be had led and lorded 
over were all ahead of him now, because of the months he had lost, and that spring and summer he 
studied with lads younger than himself. Nor did he shine among them, for the words of any spell, even 
the simplest illusion-charm, came halting from his tongue, and his hands faltered at their craft. 
In autumn he was to go once again to the Isolate Tower to study with the Master Namer. This task 
which he had once dreaded now pleased him, for silence was what he sought, and long learning where 
no spells were wrought, and where that power which he knew was still in him would never be called 
upon to act. 
The night before he left for the Tower a visitor came to his room, one wearing a brown travellingcloak 
and carrying a staff of oak shod with iron. Ged stood up, at sight of the wizard's staff. 
"Sparrowhawk-" 
At the sound of the voice, Ged raised his eyes: it was Vetch standing there, solid and foursquare as 
ever, his black blunt face older but his smile unchanged. On his shoulder crouched a little beast, brindlefurred 
and brighteyed. 
"He stayed with me while you were sick, and now I'm sorry to part with him. And sorrier to part 
with you, Sparrowhawk. But I'm going home. Here, hoeg! go to your true master!" Vetch patted the otak 
and set it down on the floor. It went and sat on Ged's pallet, and began to wash its fur with a dry brown 
tongue like a little leaf. Vetch laughed, but Ged could not smile. He bent down to hide his face, stroking 
the otak. 
"I thought you wouldn't come to me, Vetch," he said. 
He did not mean any reproach, but Vetch answered, "I couldn't come to you. The Master Herbal 
forbade me; and since winter I've been with the Master in the Grove, locked up myself. I was not free, 
until I earned my staff. Listen: when you too are free, come to the East Reach. I will be waiting for you. 
There's good cheer in the little towns there, and wizards are well received." 
"Free..." Ged muttered, and shrugged a little, trying to smile. 
Vetch looked at him, not quite as he had used to look, with no less love but more wizardry, perhaps. 
He said gently, "You won't stay bound on Roke forever." 
"Well... I have thought, perhaps I may come to work with the Master in the Tower, to be one of 
those who seek among the books and the stars for lost names, and so... so do no more harm, if not much 
good... " 
"Maybe," said Vetch. "I am no seer, but I see before you, not rooms and books, but far seas, and the 
fire of dragons, and the towers of cities, and all such things a hawk sees when he flies far and high." 
"And behind me - what do you see behind me?" Ged asked, and stood up as he spoke, so that the 
werelight that burned overhead between them sent his shadow back against the wall and floor. Then he 
turned his face aside and said, stammering, "But tell me where you will go, what you will do." 

 "I will go home, to see my brothers and the sister you have heard me speak of. I left her a little 
child and soon she'll be having her Naming - it's strange to think of! And so I'll find me a job of wizardry 
somewhere among the little isles. Oh, I would stay and talk with you, but I can't, my ship goes out 
tonight and the tide is turned already. Sparrowhawk, if ever your way lies East, come to me. And if ever 
you need me, send for me, call on me by my name: Estarriol." 
At that Ged lifted his scarred face, meeting his friend's eyes. 
"Estarriol," he said, "my name is Ged." 
Then quietly they bade each other farewell, and Vetch turned and went down the stone hallway, 
and left Roke. 
Ged stood still a while, like one who has received great news, and must enlarge his spirit to receive 
it. It was a great gift that Vetch had given him, the knowledge of his true name. 
No one knows a man's true name but himself and his namer. He may choose at length to tell it to 
his brother, or his wife, or his friend, yet even those few will never use it where any third person may 
hear it. In front of other people they will, like other people, call him by his use-name, his nickname - 
such a name as Sparrowhawk, and Vetch, and Ogion which means "fir-cone". If plain men hide their 
true name from all but a few they love and trust utterly, so much more must wizardly men, being more 
dangerous, and more endangered. Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus 
to Ged who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given that gift only a friend can give, the proof of 
unshaken, unshakable trust. 
Ged sat down on his pallet and let the globe of werelight die, giving off as it faded a faint whiff of 
marsh-gas. He petted the otak, which stretched comfortably and went to sleep on his knee as if it had 
never slept anywhere else. The Great House was silent. It came to Ged's mind that this was the eve of his 
own Passage, the day on which Ogion had given him his name. Four years were gone since then. He 
remembered the coldness of the mountain spring through which he had walked naked and unnamed. He 
fell to thinking of other bright pools in the River Ar, where he had used to swim; and of Ten Alders 
village under the great slanting forests of the mountain; of the shadows of morning across the dusty 
village street, the fire leaping under bellows-blast in the smith's smelting-pit on a winter afternoon, the 
witch's dark fragrant but where the air was heavy with smoke and wreathing spells. He had not thought 
of these things for a long time. Now they came back to him, on this night he was seventeen years old. 
All the years and places of his brief broken life came within mind's reach and made a whole again. He 
knew once more, at last, after this long, bitter, wasted time, who he was and where he was. 
But where he must go in the years to come, that he could not see; and he feared to see it. 
Next morning he set out across the island, the otak riding on his shoulder as it had used to. This 
time it took him three days, not two, to walk to the Isolate Tower, and he was bone-weary when he came 
in sight of the Tower above the spitting, hissing seas of the northern cape. Inside, it was dark as he 
remembered, and cold as he remembered, and Kurremkarmerruk sat on his high seat writing down lists 
of names. He glanced at Ged and said without welcome, as if Ged had never been away, "Go to bed; 
tired is stupid. Tomorrow you may open the Book of the Undertakings of the Makers, learning the 
names therein." 
At winter's end he returned to the Great House. He was made sorcerer then, and the Archmage 
Gensher accepted at that time his fealty. Thenceforth he studied the high arts and enchantments, passing 
beyond arts of illusion to the works of real magery, learning what he must know to earn his wizard's 
staff. The trouble he had had in speaking spells wore off over the months, and skill returned into his 

hands: yet he was never so quick to learn as he had been, having learned a long hard lesson from fear. 
Yet no ill portents or encounters followed on his working even of the Great Spells of Making and 
Shaping, which are most perilous. He came to wonder at times if the shadow he had loosed might have 
grown weak, or fled somehow out of the world, for it came no more into his dreams. But in his heart he 
knew such hope was folly. 
From the Masters and from ancient lore-books Ged learned what he could about such beings as this 
shadow he had loosed; little was there to learn. No such creature was described or spoken of directly. 
There were at best hints here and there in the old books of things that might be like the shadowbeast. 
It was not a ghost of human man, nor was it a creature of the Old Powers of Earth, and yet it 
seemed it might have some link with these. In the Matter of the Dragons, which Ged read very closely, 
there was a tale of an ancient Dragonlord who had come under the sway of one of the Old Powers, a 
speaking stone that lay in a far northern land. "At the Stone's command," said the book, "he did speak to 
raise up a dead spirit out of the realm of the dead, but his wizardry being bent awry by the Stone's will 
there came with the dead spirit also a thing not summoned, which did devour him out from within and in 
his shape walked, destroying men." But the book did not say what the thing was, nor did it tell the end of 
the tale. And the Masters did not know where such a shadow might come from: from unlife, the 
Archmage had said; from the wrong side of the world, said the Master Changer; and the Master 
Summoner said, "I do not know." The Summoner had come often to sit with Ged in his illness. He was 
grim and grave as ever, but Ged knew now his compassion, and loved him well. "I do not know. I know 
of the thing only this: that only a great power could have summoned up such a thing, and perhaps only 
one power - only one voice - your voice. But what in turn that means, I do not know. You will find out. 
You must find out, or die, and worse than die..." He spoke softly and his eyes were somber as he looked 
at Ged. "You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we 
all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can 
follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do...' 
The Archmage sent Ged, after his eighteenth birthday, to work with the Master Patterner. What is 
learned in the Immanent Grove is not much talked about elsewhere. It is said that no spells are worked 
there, and yet the place itself is an enchantment. Sometimes the trees of that Grove, are seen, and 
sometimes they are not seen, and they are not always in the same place and part of Roke Island. It is said 
that the trees of the Grove themselves are wise. It is said that the Master Patterner learns his supreme 
magery there within the Grove, and if ever the trees should die so shall his wisdom die, and in those 
days the waters will rise and drown the islands of Earthsea which Segoy raised from the deeps in the 
time before myth, all the lands where men and dragons dwell. 
But all this is hearsay; wizards will not speak of it. 
The months went by, and at last on a day of spring Ged returned to the Great House, and he had no 
idea what would be asked of him next. At the door that gives on the path across the fields to Roke Knoll 
an old man met him, waiting for him in the doorway. At first Ged did not know him, and then putting his 
mind to it recalled him as the one who had let him into the School on the day of his coming, five years 
ago. 
The old man smiled, greeting him by name, and asked, "Do you know who I am?" 
Now Ged had thought before of how it was always said, the Nine Masters of Roke, although he 
knew only eight: Windkey, Hand, Herbal, Chanter, Changer, Summoner, Namer, Patterner. It seemed 
that people spoke of the Archmage as the ninth. Yet when a new Archmage was chosen, nine Masters 

met to choose him. 
"I think you are the Master Doorkeeper," said Ged. 
"I am. Ged, you won entrance to Roke by saying your name. Now you may win your freedom of it 
by saying mine." So said the old man smiling, and waited. Ged stood dumb. 
He knew a thousand ways and crafts and means for finding out names of things and of men, of 
course; such craft was a part of everything he had learned at Roke, for without it there could be little 
useful magic done. But to find out the name of a Mage and Master was another matter. A mage's name is 
better hidden than a herring in the sea, better guarded than a dragon's den. A prying charm will be met 
with a stronger charm, subtle devices will fail, devious inquiries will be deviously thwarted, and force 
will be turned ruinously back upon itself. 
"You keep a narrow door, Master," said Ged at last. "I must sit out in the fields here, I think, and 
fast till I grow thin enough to slip through" 
"As long as you like," said the Doorkeeper, smiling. 
So Ged went off a little way and sat down under an alder on the banks of the Thwilburn, letting his 
otak run down to play in the stream and hunt the muddy banks for creekcrabs. The sun went down, late 
and bright, for spring was well along. Lights of lantern and werelight gleamed in the windows of the 
Great House, and down the hill the streets of Thwil town filled with darkness. Owls hooted over the 
roofs and bats flitted in the dusk air above the stream, and still Ged sat thinking how he might, by force, 
ruse, or sorcery, learn the Doorkeeper's name. The more he pondered the less he saw, among all the arts 
of witchcraft he had learned in these five years on Roke, any one that would serve to wrest such a secret 
from such a mage. 
He lay down in the field and slept under the stars, with the otak nestling in his pocket. After the sun 
was up he went, still fasting, to the door of the House and knocked. The Doorkeeper opened. 
"Master," said Ged, "I cannot take your name from you, not being strong enough, and I cannot trick 
your name from you, not being wise enough. So I am content to stay here, and learn or serve, whatever 
you will: unless by chance you will answer a question I have." 
"Ask it." 
"What is your name?" 
The Doorkeeper smiled, and said his name: and Ged, repeating it, entered for the last time into that 
House. 
When he left it again he wore a heavy dark-blue cloak, the gift of the township of Low Torning, 
whereto be was bound, for they wanted a wizard there. He carried also a staff of his own height, carved 
of yew-wood, bronze-shod. The Doorkeeper bade him farewell opening the back door of the Great 
House for him, the door of horn and ivory, and he went down the streets of Thwil to a ship that waited 
for him on the bright water in the morning. 
------ 
5 The Dragon of Pendor 
------ 
West of Roke in a crowd between the two great lands Hosk and Ensmer lie the Ninety Isles. The 
nearest to Roke is Serd, and the farthest is Seppish, which lies almost in the Pelnish Sea; and whether the 
sum of them is ninety is a question never settled, for if you count only isles with freshwater springs you 

might have seventy, while if you count every rock you might have a hundred and still not be done; and 
then the tide would change. Narrow run the channels between the islets, and there the mild tides of the 
Inmost Sea, chafed and baffled, run high and fall low, so that where at high tide there might be three 
islands in one place, at low there might be one. Yet for all that danger of the tide, every child who can 
walk can paddle, and has his little rowboat; housewives row across the channel to take a cup of 
rushwash tea with the neighbor; peddlers call their wares in rhythm with the stroke of their oars. All 
roads there are salt water, blocked only by nets strung from house to house across the straits to catch the 
small fish called turbies, the oil of which is the wealth of the Ninety Isles. There are few bridges, and no 
great towns. Every islet is thick with farms and fishermen's houses, and these are gathered into 
townships each of ten or twenty islets. One such was Low Torning, the westernmost, looking not on the 
Inmost Sea but outward to empty ocean, that lonely corner of the Archipelago where only Pendor lies, 
the dragon-spoiled isle, and beyond it the waters of the West Reach, desolate. 
A house was ready there for the township's new wizard. It stood on a hill among green fields of 
barley, sheltered from the west wind by a grove of pendick-trees that now were red with flowers. From 
the door one looked out on other thatched roofs and groves and gardens, and other islands with their 
roofs and fields and hills, and amongst them all the many bright winding channels of the sea. It was a 
poor house, windowless, with earthen floor, yet a better house than the one Ged was born in. The Isle- 
Men of Low Torning, standing in awe of the wizard from Roke, asked pardon for its humbleness. "We 
have no stone to build with," said one, "We are none of us rich, though none starve," said another, and a 
third, "It will be dry at least, for I saw to the thatching myself, Sir." To Ged it was as good as any palace. 
He thanked the leaders of the township frankly, so that the eighteen of them went home, each in his own 
rowboat to his home isle, to tell the fishermen and housewives that the new wizard was a strange young 
grim fellow who spoke little, but he spoke fairly, and without pride. 
There was little cause, perhaps, for pride in this first magistry of Ged's. Wizards trained on Roke 
went commonly to cities or castles, to serve high lords who held them in high honor. These fisherman of 
Low Torning in the usual way of things would have had among them no more than a witch or a plain 
sorcerer, to charm the fishing-nets and sing over new boats and cure beasts and men of their ailments. 
But in late years the old Dragon of Pendor had spawned: nine dragons, it was said, now laired in the 
ruined towers of the Sealords of Pendor, dragging their scaled bellies up and down the marble stairs and 
through the broken doorways there. Wanting food on that dead isle, they would be flying forth some 
year when they were grown and hunger came upon them. Already a flight of four had been seen over the 
southwest shores of Hosk, not alighting but spying out the sheepfolds, barns, and villages. The hunger of 
a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate. So the Isle-Men of Low Torning had sent to Roke begging for 
a wizard to protect their folk from what boded over the western horizon, and the Archmage had judged 
their fear well founded. 
"There is no comfort in this place," the Archmage had said to Ged on, the day he made him wizard, 
"no fame, no wealth, mybe no risk. Will you go?" 
"I will go," Ged had replied, not from obedience only. Since the night on Roke Knoll his desire had 
turned as much against fame and display as once it had been set on them. Always now he doubted his 
strength and dreaded the trial of his power. Yet also the talk of dragons drew him with a great curiosity. 
In Gont there have been no dragons for many hundred years; and no dragon would ever fly within scent 
or sight or spell of Roke, so that there also they are a matter of tales and songs only, things sung of but 
not seen. Ged had learned all he could of dragons at the School, but it is one thing to read about dragons 

and another to meet them. The chance lay bright before him, and heartily he answered, "I will go " 
The Archmage Gensher had nodded his head, but his look was somber. "Tell me," he said at last, 
"do you fear to leave Roke? or are you eager to be gone?" 
"Both, my lord." 
Again Gensher nodded. "I do not know if I do right to send you from your safety here," he said very 
low. "I cannot see your way. It is all in darkness. And there is a power in the North, something that 
would destroy you, but what it is and where, whether in your past or on your forward way, I cannot tell: 
it is all shadowed. When the men from Low Torning came here, I thought at once of you, for it seemed a 
safe place and out of the way, where you might have time to gather your strength. But I do not know if 
any place is safe for you, or where your way goes. I do not want to send you out into the dark..." 
It seemed a bright enough place to Ged at first, the house under the flowering trees. There he lived, 
and watched the western sky often, and kept his wizard's ear tuned for the sound of scaly wings. But no 
dragon came. Ged fished from his jetty, and tended his garden-patch. He spent whole days pondering a 
page or a line or a word in the Lore-Books he had brought from Roke, sitting out in the summer air 
under the pendick-trees, while the otak slept beside him or went hunting mice in the forests of grass and 
daisies. And he served the people of Low Torning as healall and weatherworker whenever they asked 
him. It did not enter his head that a wizard might be ashamed to perform such simple crafts, for he had 
been a witchchild among poorer folk than these. They, however, asked little of him, holding him in awe, 
partly because he was a wizard from the Isle of the Wise, and partly on account of his silence and his 
scarred face. There was that about him, young as he was, that made men uneasy with him. 
Yet he found a friend, a boatmaker who dwelt on the next islet eastward. His name was Pechvarry. 
They had met first on his jetty, where Ged stopped to watch him stepping the mast of a little catboat. He 
had looked up at the wizard with a grin and said, "Here's a month's work nearly finished. I guess you 
might have done it in a minute with a word, eh, Sir?" 
"I might," said Ged, "but it would likely sink the next minute, unless I kept the spells up. But if you 
like..." He stopped. 
"Well, Sir?" 
"Well, that is a lovely little craft. She needs nothing. But if you like, I could set a binding-spell on 
her, to help keep her sound; or a finding-spell, to help bring her home from the sea." 
He spoke hesitantly, not wanting to offend the craftsman, but Pechvarry's face shone. "The little 
boat's for my son, Sir, and if you would lay such charms on her, it would be a mighty kindness and a 
friendly act." And he climbed up onto the jetty to take Ged's hand then and there and thank him. 
After that they came to work together often, Ged interweaving his spellcrafts with Pechvarry's 
handwork on the boats he built or repaired, and in return learning from Pechvarry how a boat was built, 
and also how a boat was handled without aid of magic: for this skill of plain sailing had been somewhat 
scanted on Roke. Often Ged and Pechvarry and his little son Ioeth went out into the channels and 
lagoons, sailing or rowing one boat or another, till Ged was a fair sailor, and the friendship between him 
and Pechvarry was a settled thing. 
Along in late autumn the boatmaker's son fell sick. The mother sent for, the witchwoman of Tesk 
Isle, who was a good hand at healing, and all seemed well for a day or two. Then in the middle of a 
stormy night came Pechvarry hammering at Ged's door, begging him to come save the child. Ged ran 
down to the boat with him and they rowed in all haste through dark and rain to the boatmaker's house. 
There Ged saw the child on his pallet-bed, and the mother crouching silent beside him, and the 

witchwoman making a smoke of corly-root and singing the Nagian Chant, which was the best healing 
she had. But she whispered to Ged, "Lord Wizard, I think this fever is the redfever, and the child will die 
of it tonight" 
When Ged knelt and put his hands on the child, he thought the same, and he drew back a moment. 
In the latter months of his own long sickness the Master Herbal had taught him much of the healer's lore, 
and the first lesson and the last of all that lore was this: Heal the wound and cure the illness, but let the 
dying spirit go. 
The mother saw his movement and the meaning of it, and cried out aloud in despair. Pechvarry 
stooped down by her saying, "The Lord Sparrowhawk will save him, wife. No need to cry! He's here 
now. He can do it." 
Hearing the mother's wail, and seeing the trust Pechvarry had in him, Ged did not know how he 
could disappoint them. He mistrusted his own judgment, and thought perhaps the child might be saved, 
if the fever could be brought down. He said, "I'll do my best, Pechvarry." 
He set to bathing the little boy with cold rainwater that they brought new-fallen from out of doors, 
and he began to say one of the spells of feverstay. The spell took no hold and made no whole, and 
suddenly he thought the child was dying in his arms. 
Summoning his power all at once and with no thought for himself, he sent his spirit out after the 
child's spirit, to bring it back home. He called the child's name, "Ioeth!" Thinking some faint answer 
came in his inward hearing he pursued, calling once more. Then he saw the little boy running fast and 
far ahead of him down a dark slope, the side of some vast hill. There was no sound. The stars above the 
hill were no stars his eyes had ever seen. Yet he knew the constellations by name: the Sheaf, the Door, 
the One Who Turns, the Tree. They were those stars that do not set, that are not paled by the coming of 
any day. He had followed the dying child too far. 
Knowing this he found himself alone on the dark hillside. It was hard to turn back, very hard. 
He turned slowly. Slowly he set one foot forward to climb back up the hill, and then the other. Step 
by step he went, each step willed. And each step was harder than the last. 
The stars did not move. No wind blew over the dry steep ground. In all the vast kingdom of the 
darkness only he moved, slowly, climbing. He came to the top of the hill, and saw the low wall of stones 
there. But across the wall, facing him, there was a shadow. 
The shadow did not have the shape of man or beast. It was shapeless, scarcely to be seen, but it 
whispered at him, though there were no words in its whispering, and it reached out towards him. And it 
stood on the side of the living, and he on the side of the dead. 
Either he must go down the hill into the desert lands and lightless cities of the dead, or he must step 
across the wall back into life, where the formless evil thing waited for him. 
His spirit-staff was in his hand, and he raised it high. With that motion, strength came into him. As 
be made to leap the low wall of stones straight at the shadow, the staff burned suddenly white, a blinding 
light in that dim place. He leaped, felt himself fall, and saw no more. 
Now what Pechvarry and his wife and the witch saw was this: the young wizard had stopped 
midway in his spell, and held the child a while motionless. Then he had laid little Ioeth gently down on 
the pallet, and had risen, and stood silent, staff in hand. All at once he raised the staff high and it blazed 
with white fire as if he held the lightning-bolt in his grip, and all the household things in the hut leaped 
out strange and vivid in that momentary fire. When their eyes were clear from the dazzlement they saw 
the young man lying huddled forward on the earthen floor, beside the pallet where the child lay dead. 

 To Pechvarry it seemed that the wizard also was dead. His wife wept, but he was utterly 
bewildered. But the witch had some hearsay knowledge concerning magery and the ways a true wizard 
may go, and she saw to it that Ged, cold and lifeless as he lay, was not treated as a dead man but as one 
sick or tranced. He was carried home, and an old woman was left to watch and see whether he slept to 
wake or slept for ever. 
The little otak was hiding in the rafters of the house, as it did when strangers entered. There it 
stayed while the rain beat on the walls and the fire sank down and the night wearing slowly along left 
the old woman nodding beside the hearthpit. Then the otak crept down and came to Ged where he lay 
stretched stiff and still upon the bed. It began to lick his hands and wrists, long and patiently, with its dry 
leafbrown tongue. Crouching beside his head it licked his temple, his scarred cheek, and softly his 
closed eyes. And very slowly under that soft touch Ged roused. He woke, not knowing where he had 
been or where he was or what was the faint grey light in the air about him, which was the light of dawn 
coming to the world. Then the otak curled up near his shoulder as usual, and went to sleep. 
Later, when Ged thought back upon that night, he knew that had none touched him when he lay 
thus spirit-lost, had none called him back in some way, he might have been lost for good. It was only the 
dumb instinctive wisdom of the beast who licks his hurt companion to comfort him, and yet in that 
wisdom Ged saw something akin to his own power, something that went as deep as wizardry. From that 
time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, 
whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in 
silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees. 
He had now made unscathed, for the first time, that crossing-over and return which only a wizard 
can make with open eyes, and which not the greatest mage can make without risk. But he had returned to 
a grief and a fear. The grief was for his friend Pechvarry, the fear was for himself. He knew now why 
the Archmage had feared to send him forth, and what had darkened and clouded even the mage's 
forseeing of his future. For it was darkness itself that had awaited him, the unnamed thing, the being that 
did not belong in the world, the shadow he had loosed or made. In spirit, at the boundary wall between 
death and life, it had waited for him these long years. It had found him there at last. It would be on his 
track now, seeking to draw near to him, to take his strength into itself, and suck up his' life, and clothe 
itself in his flesh. 
Soon after, he dreamed of the thing like a bear with no head or face. He thought it went fumbling 
about the walls of the house, searching for the door. Such a dream he had not dreamed since the healing 
of the wounds the thing had given him. When he woke he was weak and cold, and the scars on his face 
and shoulder drew and ached. 
Now began a bad time. When he dreamed of the shadow or so much as thought of it, he felt always 
that same cold dread: sense and power drained out of him, leaving him stupid and astray. He raged at his 
cowardice, but that did no good. He sought for some protection, but there was none: the thing was not 
flesh, not alive, not spirit, unnamed, having no being but what he himself had given it - a terrible power 
outside the laws of the sunlit world. All he knew of it was that it was drawn to him and would try to 
work its will through him, being his creature. But in what form it could come, having no real form of its 
own as yet, and how it would come, and when it would come, this he did not know. 
He set up what barriers of sorcery he could about his house and about the isle where he lived. Such 
spell-walls must be ever renewed, and soon he saw that if he spent all his strength on these defenses, he 
would be of no use to the islanders. What could he do, between two enemies, if a dragon came from 

Pendor? 
Again he dreamed, but this time in the dream the shadow was inside his house, beside the door, 
reaching out to him through the darkness and whispering words he did not understand. He woke in 
terror, and sent the werelight flaming through the air, lighting every corner of the little house till he saw 
no shadow anywhere. Then he put wood on the coals of his firepit, and sat in the firelight hearing the 
autumn wind fingering at the thatch roof and whining in the great bare trees above; and he pondered 
long. An old anger had awakened in his heart. He would not suffer this helpless waiting, this sitting 
trapped on a little island muttering useless spells of lock and ward. Yet he could not simply flee the trap: 
to do so would be to break his trust with the islanders and to leave them to the imminent dragon, 
undefended. There was but one way to take. 
The next morning he went down among the fishermen in the principal moorage of Low Toming, 
and finding the Head Isle-Man there said to him, "I must leave this place. I am in danger, and I put you 
in danger. I must go. Therefore I ask your leave to go out and do away with the dragons on Pendor, so 
that my task for you will be finished and I may leave freely. Or if I fail, I should fail also when they 
come here, and that is better known now than later." 
The Isle-Man stared at him all dropjawed. "Lord Sparrowhawk," he said, "there are nine dragons 
out there!" 
"Eight are still young, they say." 
"But the old one-" 
"I tell you, I must go from here. I ask your leave to rid you of the dragon-peril first, if I can do so." 
"As you will, Sir," the Isle-Man said gloomily. All that listened there thought this a folly or a crazy 
courage in their young wizard, and with sullen faces they saw him go, expecting no news of him again. 
Some hinted that he meant merely to sail back by Hosk to the Inmost Sea, leaving them in the lurch; 
others, among them Pechvarry, held that he had gone mad, and sought death. 
For four generations of men all ships had set their course to keep far from the shores of Pendor 
Island. No mage had ever come to do combat with the dragon there, for the island was on no travelled 
sea road, and its lords had been pirates, slave-takers, war-makers, hated by all that dwelt in the 
southwest parts of Earthsea. For this reason none had sought to revenge the Lord of Pendor, after the 
dragon came suddenly out of the west upon him and his men where they sat feasting in the tower, and 
smothered them with the flames of his mouth, and drove all the townsfolk screaming into the sea. 
Unavenged, Pendor had been left to the dragon, with all its bones, and towers, and jewels stolen from 
long-dead princes of the coasts of Paln and Hosk. 
All this Ged knew well, and more, for ever since he came to Low Torning he had held in mind and 
pondered over all he had ever learned, of dragons. As he guided his small boat westward - not rowing 
now nor using the seaman's skill Pechvarry had taught him, but sailing wizardly with the magewind in 
his sail and a spell set on prow and keel to keep them true - he watched to see the dead isle rise on the 
rim of the sea. Speed he wanted, and therefore used the magewind, for he feared what was behind him 
more than what was before him. But as the day passed, his impatience turned from fear to a kind of glad 
fierceness. At least he sought this danger of his own will; and the nearer he came to it the more sure he 
was that, for this time at least, for this hour perhaps before his death, he was free. The shadow dared not 
follow him into a dragon's jaws. The waves ran white-tipped on the grey sea, and grey clouds streamed 
overhead on the north wind. He went west with the quick magewind in his sail, and came in sight of the 
rocks of Pendor, the still streets of the town, and the gutted, falling towers. 

 At the entrance of the harbor, a shallow crescent bay, he let the windspell drop and stilled his little 
boat so it lay rocking on the waves. Then he summoned the dragon: "Usurper of Pendor, come defend 
your hoard!" 
His voice fell short in the sound of breakers beating on the ashen shores; but dragons have keen 
ears. Presently one flitted up from some roofless ruin of the town like a vast black bat, thin-winged and 
spinybacked, and circling into the north wind came flying towards Ged. His heart swelled at the sight of 
the creature that was a myth to his people, and he laughed and shouted, "Go tell the Old One to come, 
you wind-worm!" 
For this was one of the young dragons, spawned there years ago by a she-dragon from the West 
Reach, who had set her clutch of great leathern eggs, as they say she-dragons will, in some sunny broken 
room of the tower and had flown away again, leaving the Old Dragon of Pendor to watch the young 
when they crawled like baneful lizards from the shell. 
The young dragon made no answer. He was not large of his kind, maybe the length of a forty-oared 
ship, and was worm-thin for all the reach of his black membranous wings. He had not got his growth 
yet, nor his voice, nor any dragon-cunning. Straight at Ged in the small rocking boat he came, opening 
his long, toothed jaws as he slid down arrowy from the air: so that all Ged had to do was bind his wings 
and limbs stiff with one sharp spell and send him thus hurtling aside into the sea like a stone falling. And 
the grey sea closed over him. 
Two dragons like the first rose up from the base of the highest tower. Even as the first one they 
came driving straight at Ged, and even so he caught both, hurled both down, and drowned them; and he 
had not yet lifted up his wizard's staff. 
Now after a little time there came three against him from the island. One of these was much greater, 
and fire spewed curling from its jaws. Two came flying at him rattling their wings, but the big one came 
circling from behind, very swift, to burn him and his boat with its breath of fire. No binding spell would 
catch all three, because two came from north and one from south. In the instant that he saw this, Ged 
worked a spell of Changing, and between one breath and the next flew up from his boat in dragonform. 
Spreading broad wings and reaching talons out, he met the two head on, withering them with fire, 
and then turned to the third, who was larger than he and armed also with fire. On the wind over the grey 
waves they doubled, snapped, swooped, lunged, till smoke roiled about them red-lit by the glare of their 
fiery mouths. Ged flew suddenly upward and the other pursued, below him. In midflight the dragon Ged 
raised wings, stopped, and stooped as the hawk stoops, talons outstretched downward, striking and 
bearing the other down by neck and flank. The black wings flurried and black dragon-blood dropped in 
thick drops into the sea. The Pendor dragon tore free and flew low and lamely to the island, where it hid, 
crawling into some well or cavern in the ruined town. 
At once Ged took his form and place again on the boat, for it was most perilous to keep that dragonshape 
longer than need demanded. His hands were black with the scalding wormblood, and he was 
scorched about the head with fire, but this was no matter now. He waited only till he had his breath back 
and then called, "Six I have seen, five slain, nine are told of: come out, worms!" 
No creature moved nor voice spoke for a long while on the island, but only the waves beat loudly 
on the shore. Then Ged was aware that the highest tower slowly changed its shape, bulging out on one 
side as if it grew an arm. He feared dragon-magic, for old dragons are very powerful and guileful in a 
sorcery like and unlike the sorcery of men: but a moment more and he saw this was no trick of the 
dragon, but of his own eyes. What he had taken for a part of the tower was the shoulder of the Dragon of 

Pendor as he uncurled his bulk and lifted himself slowly up. 
When he was all afoot his scaled head, spikecrowned and triple-tongued, rose higher than the 
broken tower's height, and his taloned forefeet rested on the rubble of the town below. His scales were 
grey-black, catching the daylight like broken stone. Lean as a hound he was and huge as a hill. Ged 
stared in awe. There was no song or tale could prepare the mind for this sight. Almost he stared into the 
dragon's eyes and was caught, for one cannot look into a dragon's eyes. He glanced away from the oily 
green gaze that watched him, and held up before him his staff, that looked now like a splinter, like a twig. 
"Eight sons I had, little wizard," said the great dry voice of the dragon. "Five died, one dies: 
enough. You will not win my hoard by killing them." 
"I do not want your hoard." 
The yellow smoke hissed from the dragon's nostrils: that was his laughter. 
"Would you not like to come ashore and look at it, little wizard? It is worth looking at." 
"No, dragon." The kinship of dragons is with wind and fire, and they do not fight willingly over the 
sea. That had been Ged's advantage so far and he kept it; but the strip of seawater between him and the 
great grey talons did not seem much of an advantage, any more. 
It was hard not to look into the green, watching eyes. 
"You are a very young wizard," the dragon said, "I did not know men came so young into their 
power." He spoke, as did Ged, in the Old Speech, for that is the tongue of dragons still. Although the use 
of the Old Speech binds a man to truth, this is not so with dragons. It is their own language, and they can 
lie in it, twisting the true words to false ends, catching the unwary hearer in a maze of mirrorwords each 
of which reflects the truth and none of which leads anywhere. So Ged had been warned often, and when 
the dragon spoke he listened with an untrustful ear, all his doubts ready. But the words seemed plain and 
clear: "Is it to ask my help that you have come here, little wizard?" 
"No, dragon." 
"Yet I could help you. You will need help soon, against that which hunts you in the dark." 
Ged stood dumb. 
"What is it that hunts you? Name it to me." 
"If I could name it-" Ged stopped himself. 
Yellow smoke curled above the dragon's long head, from the nostrils that were two round pits of 
fire. 
"If you could name it you could master it, maybe, little wizard. Maybe I could tell you its name, 
when I see it close by. And it will come close, if you wait about my isle. It will come wherever you 
come. If you do not want it to come close you must run, and run, and keep running from it. And yet it 
will follow you. Would you like to know its name?" 
Ged stood silent again. How the dragon knew of the shadow he bad loosed, he could not guess, nor 
how it might know the shadow's name. The Archmage bad said that the shadow had no name. Yet 
dragons have their own wisdom; and they are an older race than man. Few men can guess what a dragon 
knows and how he knows it, and those few are the Dragonlords. To Ged, only one thing was sure: that, 
though the dragon might well be speaking truth, though he might indeed be able to tell Ged the nature 
and name of the shadow-thing and so give him power over it - even so, even if he spoke truth, he did so 
wholly for his own ends. 
"It is very seldom," the young man said at last, "that dragons ask to do men favors." 
"But it is very common," said the dragon, "for cats to play with mice before they kill them. 

 "But I did not come here to play, or to be played with. I came to strike a bargain with you." 
Like a sword in sharpness but five times the length of any sword, the point of the dragon's tail 
arched up scorpionwise over his mailed back, above the tower. Dryly he spoke: "I strike no bargains. I 
take. What have you to offer that I cannot take from you when I like?" 
"Safety. Your safety. Swear that you will never fly eastward of Pendor, and I will swear to leave 
you unharmed." 
A grating sound came from the dragon's throat like the noise of an avalanche far off, stones falling 
among mountains. Fire danced along his three-forked tongue. He raised himself up higher, looming over 
the ruins. "You offer me safety! You threaten me! With what?" 
"With your name, Yevaud." 
Ged's voice shook as he spoke the name, yet he spoke it clear and loud. At the sound of it, the old 
dragon held still, utterly still. A minute went by, and another; and then Ged, standing there in his rocking 
chip of a boat, smiled. He had staked this venture and his life on a guess drawn from old histories of 
dragon-lore learned on Roke, a guess that this Dragon of Pendor was the same that had spoiled the west 
of Osskil in the days of Elfarran and Morred, and had been driven from Osskill by a wizard, Elt, wise in 
names. The guess had held. 
"We are matched, Yevaud. You have the strength: I have your name. Will you bargain?" 
Still the dragon made no reply. 
Many years bad the dragon sprawled on the island where golden breastplates and emeralds lay 
scattered among dust and bricks and bones; he had watched his black lizard-brood play among 
crumbling houses and try their wings from the cliffs; he had slept long in the sun, unwaked by voice or 
sail. He had grown old. It was hard now to stir, to face this mage-lad, this frail enemy, at the sight of 
whose staff Yevaud, the old dragon, winced. 
"You may choose nine stones from my hoard," he said at last, his voice hissing and whining in his 
long jaws. "The best: take your choice. Then go!" 
"I do not want your stones, Yevaud." 
"Where is men's greed gone? Men loved bright stones in the old days in the North... I know what it 
is you want, wizard. I, too, can offer you safety, for I know what can save you. I know what alone can 
save you. There is a horror follows you. I will tell you its name." 
Ged's heart leaped in him, and he clutched his staff, standing as still as the dragon stood. He fought 
a moment with sudden, startling hope. 
It was not his own life that he bargained for. One mastery, and only one, could he hold over the 
dragon. He set hope aside and did what he must do. 
"That is not what I ask for, Yevaud." 
When he spoke the dragon's name it was as if he held the huge being on a fine, thin leash, 
tightening it on his throat. He could feel the ancient malice and experience of men in the dragon's gaze 
that rested on him, he could see the steel talons each as long as a man's forearm, and the stone-hard hide, 
and the withering fire that lurked in the dragon's throat: and yet always the leash tightened, tightened. 
He spoke again: "Yevaud! Swear by your name that you and your sons will never come to the 
Archipelago." 
Flames broke suddenly bright and loud from the dragon's jaws, and he said, "I swear it by my 
name!" 
Silence lay over the isle then, and Yevaud lowered his great head. 

 When he raised it again and looked, the wizard was gone, and the sail of the boat was a white fleck 
on the waves eastward, heading towards the fat bejewelled islands of the inner seas. Then in rage the old 
Dragon of Pendor rose up breaking the tower with the writhing of his body, and beating his wings that 
spanned the whole width of the ruined town. But his oath held him, and he did not fly, then or ever, to 
the Archipelago. 
------ 
6 Hunted 
------ 
As soon as Pendor had sunk under the sea-rim behind him, Ged looking eastward felt the fear of the 
shadow come into his heart again; and it was hard to turn from the bright danger of the dragons to that 
formless, hopeless horror. He let the magewind drop, and sailed on with the world's wind, for there was 
no desire for speed in him now. He bad no clear plan even of what he should do. He must run, as the 
dragon had said; but where? To Roke, he thought, since there at least he was protected, and might find 
counsel among the wise. 
First, however, he must come to Low Torning once more and tell his tale to the Isle-Men. When 
word went out that he had returned, five days from his setting forth, they and half the people of the 
township came rowing and running to gather round him, and stare at him, and listen. He told his tale, 
and one man said, "But who saw this wonder of dragons slain and dragons baffled? What if he-" 
"Be still!" the Head Isle-Man said roughly, for he knew, as did most of them, that a wizard may 
have subtle ways of telling the truth, and may keep the truth to himself, but that if he says a thing the 
thing is as he says. For that is his mastery. So they wondered, and began to feel that their fear was lifted 
from them, and then they began to rejoice. They pressed round their young wizard and asked for the tale 
again. More islanders came, and asked for it again. By nightfall he no longer had to tell it. They could do 
it for him, better. Already the village chanters had fitted it to an old tune, and were singing the Song of 
the Sparrowhawk. Bonfires were burning not only on the isles of Low Torning but in townships to the 
south and east. Fishermen shouted the news from boat to boat, from isle to isle it went: Evil is averted, 
the dragons will never come from Pendor! 
That night, that one night, was joyous for Ged. No shadow could come near him through the 
brightness of those fires of thanksgiving that burned on every hill and beach, through the circles of 
laughing dancers that ringed him about, singing his praise, swinging their torches in the gusty autumn 
night so that sparks rose thick and bright and brief upon the wind. 
The next day he met with Pechvarry, who said, "I did not know you were so mighty, my lord." 
There was fear in that because he had dared make Ged his friend, but there was reproach in it also. Ged 
had not saved a little child, though he had slain dragons. After that, Ged felt afresh the unease and 
impatience that had driven him to Pendor, and drove him now from Low Torning. The next day, though 
they would have kept him gladly the rest of his life to praise and boast of, he left the house on the hill, 
with no baggage but his books, his staff, and the otak riding on his shoulder. 
He went in a rowboat with a couple of young fishermen of Low Torning, who wanted the honor of 
being his boatmen. Always as they rowed on among the craft that crowd the eastern channels of the 
Ninety Isles, under the windows and balconies of houses that lean out over the water, past the wharves 

of Nesh, the rainy pastures of Dromgan, the malodorous oil-sheds of Geath, word of his deed had gone 
ahead of him. They whistled the Song of the Sparrowhawk as he went by, they vied to have him spend 
the night and tell his dragon-tale. When at last he came to Serd, the ship's master of whom he asked 
passage out to Roke bowed as he answered, "A privilege to me, Lord Wizard, and an honor to my ship!" 
So Ged turned his back on the Ninety Isles; but even as the ship turned from Serd Inner Port and 
raised sail, a wind came up hard from the east against her. It was strange, for the wintry sky was clear 
and the weather had seemed settled mild that morning. It was only thirty miles from Serd to Roke, and 
they sailed on; and when the wind still rose, they still sailed on: The little ship, like most traders of the 
Inmost Sea, bore the high fore-and-aft sail that can be turned to catch a headwind, and her master was a 
handy seaman, proud of his skill. So tacking now north now south they worked eastward. Clouds and 
rain came up on the wind, which veered and gusted so wildly that there was considerable danger of the 
ship jibing. "Lord Sparrowhawk," said the ship's master to the young man, whom he had beside him in 
the place of honor in the stern, though small dignity could be kept up under that wind and rain that wet 
them all to a miserable sleekness in their sodden cloaks- "Lord Sparrowhawk, might you say a word to 
this wind, maybe?" 
"How near are we to Roke?" 
"Better than half way. But we've made no headway at all this past hour, Sir." 
Ged spoke to the wind. It blew less hard, and for a while they went on fairly enough. Then sudden 
great gusts came whistling out of the south, and meeting these they were driven back westward again. 
The clouds broke and boiled in the sky, and the ship's master roared out ragefully, "This fool's gale 
blows all ways at once! Only a magewind will get us through this weather, Lord." 
Ged looked glum at that, but the ship and her men were in danger for him, so he raised up the 
magewind into her sail. At once the ship began to cleave straight to the east, and the ship's master began 
to look cheerful again. But little by little, though Ged kept up the spell, the magewind slackened, 
growing feebler, until the ship seemed to hang still on the waves for a minute, her sail drooping, amid all 
the tumult of the rain and gale. Then with a thundercrack the boom came swinging round and she jibed 
and jumped northward like a scared cat. 
Ged grabbed hold of a stanchion, for she lay almost over on her side, and shouted out, "Turn back 
to Serd, master!" 
The master cursed and shouted that he would not: "A wizard aboard, and I the best seaman of the 
Trade, and this the handiest ship I ever sailed - turn back?" 
Then, the ship turning again almost as if a whirlpool had caught her keel, he too grabbed hold of the 
sternpost to keep aboard, and Ged said to him, "Leave me at Serd and sail where you like. It's not against 
your ship this wind blows, but against me." 
"Against you, a wizard of Roke?" 
"Have you never heard of the Roke-wind, master?" 
"Aye, that keeps off evil powers from the Isle of the Wise, but what has that to do with you, a 
Dragon-tamer?" 
"That is between me and my shadow," Ged answered shortly, as a wizard will; and he said no more 
as they went swiftly, with a steady wind and under clearing skies, back over the sea to Serd. 
There was a heaviness and a dread in his heart as he went up from the wharves of Serd. The days 
were shortening into winter, and dusk came soon. With dusk Ged's uneasiness always grew, and now the 
turning of each street seemed a threat to him, and he had to steel himself not to keep looking back over 

his shoulder at what might be coming behind him. He went to the Sea-House of Serd, where travellers 
and merchants ate together of good fare provided by the township, and might sleep in the long raftered 
hall: such is the hospitality of the thriving islands of the Inmost Sea. 
He saved a bit of meat from his dinner, and by the firepit afterward he coaxed the otak out of the 
fold of his hood where it had cowered all that day, and tried to get it to eat, petting it and whispering to 
it, "Hoeg, hoeg, little one, silent one..." But it would not eat, and crept into his pocket to hide. By that, 
by his own dull uncertainty, by the very look of the darkness in the corners of the great room, he knew 
that the shadow was not far from him. 
No one in this place knew him: they were travellers, from other isles, who had not heard the Song 
of the Sparrowhawk. None spoke to him. He chose a pallet at last and lay down, but all night long he lay 
with open eyes there in the raftered hall among the sleep of strangers. All night he tried to choose his 
way, to plan where he should go, what he should do: but each choice, each plan was blocked by a 
foreboding of doom. Across each way he might go lay the shadow. Only Roke was clear of it: and to 
Roke he could not go, forbidden by the high, enwoven, ancient spells that kept the perilous island safe. 
That the Roke-wind had risen against him was proof the thing that hunted him must be very close upon 
him now. 
That thing was bodiless, blind to sunlight, a creature of a lightless, placeless, timeless realm. It must 
grope after him through the days and across the seas of the sunlit world, and could take visible shape 
only in dream and darkness. It had as yet no substance or being that the light of the sun would shine on; 
and so it is sung in the Deed of Hode, "Daybreak makes all earth and sea, from shadow brings forth 
form, driving dream to the dark kingdom." But if once the shadow caught up with Ged it could draw his 
power out of him, and take from him the very weight and warmth and life of his body and the will that 
moved him. 
That was the doom he saw lying ahead on every road. And he knew that he might be tricked toward 
that doom; for the shadow, growing stronger always as it was nearer him, might even now have strength 
enough to put evil powers or evil men to its own use - showing him false portents, or speaking with a 
stranger's voice. For all he knew, in one of these men who slept in this corner or that of the raftered hall 
of the Sea-House tonight, the dark thing lurked, finding a foothold in a dark soul and there waiting and 
watching Ged and feeding, even now, on his weakness, on his uncertainty, on his fear. 
It was past bearing. He must trust to chance, and run wherever chance took him. At the first cold 
hint of dawn he got up and went in haste under the dimming stars down to the wharves of Serd, resolved 
only to take the first ship outward bound that would have him. A galley was loading turbie-oil; she was 
to sail at sunrise, bound for Havnor Great Port. Ged asked passage of her master. A wizard's staff is 
passport and payment on most ships. They took him aboard willingly, and within that hour the ship set 
forth. Ged's spirits lifted with the first lifting of the forty long oars, and the drumbeat that kept the stroke 
made a brave music to him. 
And yet he did not know what he would do in Havnor, or where he would run from there. 
Northward was as good as any direction. He was a Northerner himself; maybe he would find some ship 
to take him on to Gont from Havnor, and he might see Ogion again. Or he might find some ship going 
far out into the Reaches, so far the shadow would lose him and give up the hunt. Beyond such vague 
ideas as these, there was no plan in his head, and he saw no one course that he must follow. Only he 
must run... 
Those forty oars carried the ship over a hundred and fifty miles of wintry sea before sunset of the 

second day out from Serd. They came in to port at Orrimy on the east shore of the great land Hosk, for 
these trade-galleys of the Inmost Sea keep to the coasts and lie overnight in harbor whenever they can. 
Ged went ashore, for it was still daylight, and he roamed the steep streets of the port-town, aimless and 
brooding. 
Orrimy is an old town, built heavily of stone and brick, walled against the lawless lords of the 
interior of Hosk Island; the warehouses on the docks are like forts, and the merchants' houses are 
towered and fortified. Yet to Ged wandering through the streets those ponderous mansions seemed like 
veils, behind which lay an empty dark; and people who passed him, intent on their business, seemed not 
real men but voiceless shadows of men. As the sun set he came down to the wharves again, and even 
there in the broad red light and wind of the day's end, sea and land alike to him seemed dim and silent. 
"Where are you bound, Lord Wizard?" 
So one hailed him suddenly from behind. Turning he saw a man dressed in grey, who carried a staff 
of heavy wood that was not a wizard's staff. The stranger's face was hidden by his hood from the red 
light, but Ged felt the unseen eyes meet his. Starting back he raised his own yewstaff between him and 
the stranger. 
Mildly the man asked, "What do you fear?" 
"What follows behind me." 
"So? But I'm not your shadow." 
Ged stood silent. He knew that indeed this man, whatever he was, was not what he feared: he was 
no shadow or ghost or gebbeth-creature. Amidst the dry silence and shadowiness that had come over the 
world, he even kept a voice and some solidity. He put back his hood now. He had a strange, seamed, 
bald head, a lined face. Though age had not sounded in his voice, he looked to be an old man. 
"I do not know you," said the man in grey, "yet I think perhaps we do not meet by chance. I heard a 
tale once of a young man, a scarred man, who won through darkness to great dominion, even to 
kingship. I do not know if that is your tale. But I will tell you this: go to the Court of the Terrenon, if you 
need a sword to fight shadows with. A staff of yew-wood will not serve your need." 
Hope and mistrust struggled in Ged's mind as he listened. A wizardly man soon learns that few 
indeed of his meetings are chance ones, be they for good or for ill. 
"In what land is the Court of the Terrenon?" 
"In Osskill." 
At the sound of that name Ged saw for a moment, by a trick of memory, a black raven on green 
grass who looked up at him sidelong with an eye like polished stone, and spoke; but the words were 
forgotten. 
That land has something of a dark name," Ged said, looking ever at the man in grey, trying to judge 
what kind of man he was. There was a manner about him that hinted of the sorcerer, even of the wizard; 
and yet boldly as he spoke to Ged, there was a queer beaten look about him, the look almost of a sick 
man, or a prisoner, or a slave. 
"You are from Roke," he answered. "The wizards of Roke give a dark name to wizardries other 
than their own." 
"What man are you?" 
"A traveller; a trader's agent from Osskil; I am here on business," said the man in grey. When Ged 
asked him no more he quietly bade the young man good night, and went off up the narrow stepped street 
above the quays. 

 Ged turned, irresolute whether to heed this sign or not, and looked to the north. The red light was 
dying out fast from the hills and from the windy sea. Grey dusk came, and on its heels the night. 
Ged went in sudden decision and haste along the quays to a fisherman who was folding his nets 
down in his dory, and hailed him: "Do you know any ship in this port bound north -to Semel, or the 
Enlades?" 
"The longship yonder's from Osskil, she might be stopping at the Enlades." 
In the same haste Ged went on to the great ship the fisherman had pointed to, a longship of sixty 
oars, gaunt as a snake, her high bent prow carven and inlaid with disks of loto-shell, her oarport-covers 
painted red, with the rune Sifl sketched on each in black. A grim, swift ship she looked, and all in seatrim, 
with all her crew aboard. Ged sought out the ship's master and asked passage to Osskil of him. 
"Can you pay?" 
"I have some skill with winds." 
"I am a weatberworker myself. You have nothing to give? no money?" 
In Low Torning the Isle-Men had paid Ged as best they could with the ivory pieces used by traders 
in the Archipelago; he would take only ten pieces, though they wanted to give him more. He offered 
these now to the Osskilian, but he shook his head. "We do not use those counters. If you have nothing to 
pay, I have no place aboard for you." 
"Do you need arms? I have rowed in a galley." 
"Aye, we're short two men. Find your bench then," said the ship's master, and paid him no more 
heed. 
So, laying his staff and his bag of books under the rowers' bench, Ged became for ten bitter days of 
winter an oarsman of that Northern ship. They left Orrimy at daybreak, and that day Ged thought he 
could never keep up his work. His left arm was somewhat lamed by the old wounds in his shoulder, and 
all his rowing in the channels about Low Torning had not trained him for the relentless pull and pull and 
pull at the long galley-oar to the beat of the drum. Each stint at the oars was of two or three hours, and 
then a second shift of oarsmen took the benches, but the time of rest seemed only long enough for all 
Ged's muscles to stiffen, and then it was back to the oars. And the second day of it was worse; but after 
that he hardened to the labor, and got on well enough. 
There was no such comradeship among this crew as he had found aboard Shadow when he first 
went to Roke. The crewmen of Andradean and Gontish ships are partners in the trade, working together 
for a common profit, whereas traders of Osskil use slaves and bondsmen or hire men to row, paying 
them with small coins of gold. Gold is a great thing in Osskil. But it is not a source of good fellowship 
there, or amongst the dragons, who also prize it highly. Since half this crew were bondsmen, forced to 
work, the ship's officers were slavemasters, and harsh ones. They never laid their whips on the back of 
an oarsman who worked for pay or passage; but there will not be much friendliness in a crew of whom 
some are whipped and others are not. Ged's fellows said little to one another, and less to him. They were 
mostly men from Osskil, speaking not the Hardic tongue of the Archipelago but a dialect of their own, 
and they were dour men, pale-skinned with black drooping mustaches and lank hair. Kelub, the red one, 
was Ged's name among them. Though they knew he was a wizard they showed him no regard, but rather 
a kind of cautious spitefulness. And he himself was in no mood for making friends. Even on his bench, 
caught up in the mighty rhythm of the rowing, one oarsman among sixty in a ship racing over void grey 
seas, he felt himself exposed, defenseless. When they came into strange ports at nightfall and he rolled 
himself in his cloak to sleep, weary as he was he would dream, wake, dream again: evil dreams, that he 

could not recall waking, though they seemed to hang about the ship and the men of the ship, so that he 
mistrusted each one of them. 
All the Osskilian freemen wore a long knife at the hip, and one day as his oar-shift shared their 
noon meal one of these men asked Ged, "Are you slave or oathbreaker, Kelub?" 
"Neither." 
"Why no knife, then? Afraid to fight?" said the man, Skiorb, jeering. 
"No." 
"Your little dog fight for you?" 
"Otak," said another who listened. "No dog, that is otak," and he said something in Osskilian that 
made Skiorh scowl and turn away. just as he turned Ged saw a change in his face, a slurring and shifting 
of the features, as if for a moment something had changed him, used him, looking out through his eyes 
sidelong at Ged. Yet the next minute Ged saw him fullface, and he looked as usual, so that Ged told 
himself that what he had seen was his own fear, his own dread reflected in the other's eyes. But that 
night as they lay in port in Esen he dreamed, and Skiorh walked in his dream. Afterwards he avoided the 
man as best he could, and it seemed also that Skiorh kept away from him, and no more words passed 
between them. 
The snow-crowned mountains of Havnor sank away behind them southward, blurred by the mists 
of early winter. They rowed on past the mouth of the Sea of Ea where long ago Elfarran was drowned, 
and past the Enlades. They lay two days in port at Berila, the City of Ivory, white above its bay in the 
west of myth-haunted Enlad. At all ports they came to, the crewmen were kept aboard the ship, and set 
no foot on land. Then as a red sun rose they rowed out on the Osskil Sea, into the northeast winds that 
blow unhindered from the islandless vastness of the North Reach. Through that bitter sea they brought 
their cargo safe, coming the second day out of Berila into port at Neshum, the trade-city of Eastern 
Osskil. 
Ged saw a low coast lashed by rainy wind, a grey town crouching behind the long stone 
breakwaters that made its harbor, and behind the town treeless hills under a snowdarkened sky. They 
had come far from the sunlight of the Inmost Sea. 
Longshoremen of the Sea-Guild of Neshum came aboard to unload the cargo - gold, silver, jewelry, 
fine silks and Southern tapestries, such precious stuff as the lords of Osskil hoard-and the freemen of the 
crew were dismissed. Ged stopped one of them to ask his way; up until now the distrust he felt of all of 
them had kept him from saying where he was bound, but now, afoot and alone in a strange land, he must 
ask for guidance. The man went on impatiently saying he did not know, but Skiorh, overhearing, said, 
"The Court of the Terrenon? On the Keksemt Moors. I go that road." 
Skiorh's was no company Ged would have chosen, but knowing neither the language nor the way 
he had small choice. Nor did it much matter, he thought; he had not chosen to come here. He had been 
driven, and now was driven on. He pulled his hood up over his head, took up his staff and bag, and 
followed the Osskilian through the streets of the town and upward into the snowy hills. The little otak 
would not ride on his shoulder, but hid in the pocket of his sheepskin tunic, under his cloak, as was its 
wont in cold weather. The hills stretched out into bleak rolling moorlands as far as the eye could see. 
They walked in silence and the silence of winter lay on all the land. 
"How far?" Ged asked after they had gone some miles, seeing no sight of village or farm in any 
direction, and thinking that they had no food with them. Skiorh turned his head a moment, pulling up his 
own hood, and said, "Not far." 

 It was an ugly face, pale, coarse, and cruel, but Ged feared no man, though he might fear where 
such a man would guide him. He nodded, and they went on. Their road was only a scar through the 
waste of thin snow and leafless bushes. From time to time other tracks crossed it or branched from it. 
Now that the chimney-smoke of Neshum was hidden behind the hills in the darkening afternoon there 
was no sign at all of what way they should go, or had gone. Only the wind blew always from the east. 
And when they had walked for several hours Ged thought he saw, away off on the hills in the northwest 
where their way tended, a tiny scratch against the sky, like a tooth, white. But the light of the short day 
was fading, and on the next rise of the road he could make out the thing, tower or tree or whatever, no 
more clearly than before. 
"Do we go there?" be asked, pointing. 
Skiorh made no answer but plodded on, muffled in his coarse cloak with its peaked, furred 
Osskilian hood. Ged strode on beside him. They had come far, and he was drowsy with the steady pace 
of their walking and with the long weariness of hard days and nights in the ship. It began to seem to him 
that he had walked forever and would walk forever beside this silent being through a silent darkening 
land. Caution and intention were dulled in him. He walked as in a long, long dream, going no place. 
The otak stirred in his pocket, and a little vague fear also woke and stirred in his mind. He forced 
himself to speak. "Darkness comes, and snow. How far, Skiorh?" 
After a pause the other answered, without turning, "Not far." 
But his voice sounded not like a man's voice, but like a beast, hoarse and lipless, that tries to speak. 
Ged stopped. All around stretched empty hills in the late, dusk light. Sparse snow whirled a little 
falling. "Skiorh!" he said, and the other halted, and turned. There was no face under the peaked hood. 
Before Ged could speak spell or summon power, the gebbeth spoke, saying in its hoarse voice, 
"Ged!" 
Then the young man could work no transformation, but was locked in his true being, and must face 
the gebbeth thus defenseless. Nor could he summon any help in this alien land, where nothing and no 
one was known to him and would come at his call. He stood alone, with nothing between him and his 
enemy but the staff of yew-wood in his right hand. 
The thing that had devoured Skiorh's mind and possessed his flesh made the body take a step 
towards Ged, and the arms came groping out towards him. A rage of horror filled Ged and he swung up 
and brought down his staff whistling on the hood that hid the shadow-face. Hood and cloak collapsed 
down nearly to the ground under that fierce blow as if there was nothing in them but wind, and then 
writhing and flapping stood up again. The body of a gebbeth has been drained of true substance and is 
something like a shell or a vapor in the form of a man, an unreal flesh clothing the shadow which is real. 
So jerking and billowing as if blown on the wind the shadow spread its arms and came at Ged, trying to 
get hold of him as it had held him on Roke Knoll: and if it did it would cast aside the husk of Skiorh and 
enter into Ged, devouring him out from within, owning him, which was its whole desire. Ged struck at it 
again with his heavy, smoking staff, beating it off, but it came again and he struck again, and then 
dropped the staff that blazed and smouldered, burning his hand. He backed away, then all at once turned 
and ran. 
He ran, and the gebbeth followed a pace behind him, unable to outrun him yet never dropping 
behind. Ged never looked back. He ran, he ran, through that vast dusk land where there was no hiding 
place. Once the gebbetb in its hoarse whistling voice called him again by name, but though it had taken 
his wizard's power thus, it had no power over his body's strength, and could not make him stop. He ran. 

 Night thickened about the hunter and the hunted, and snow blew flne across the path that Ged could 
no longer see. The pulse hammered in his eyes, the breath burned in his throat, he was no longer really 
running but stumbling and staggering ahead: and yet the tireless pursuer seemed unable to catch up, 
coming always just behind him. It had begun to whisper and mumble at him, calling to him, and he 
knew that all his life that whispering had been in his ears, just under the threshold of hearing, but now he 
could hear it, and he must yield, he must give in, he must stop. Yet he labored on, struggling up a long, 
dim slope. He thought there was a light somewhere before him, and he thought he heard a voice in front 
of him, above him somewhere, calling, "Come! Come!" 
He tried to answer but be had no voice. The pale light grew certain, shining through a gateway 
straight before him: he could not see the walls, but he saw the gate. At the sight of it he halted, and the 
gebbeth snatched at his cloak, fumbled at his sides trying to catch hold of him from behind. With the last 
strength in him Ged plunged through that faint-shining door. He tried to turn to shut it behind him 
against the gebbeth, but his legs would not hold him up. He staggered, reaching for support. Lights 
swam and flashed in his eyes. He felt himself falling, and he felt himself caught even as he fell; but his 
mind, utterly spent, slid away into the dark. 
------ 
7 The Hawk's Flight 
------ 
Ged woke, and for a long time he lay aware only that it was pleasant to wake, for he had not 
expected to wake again, and very pleasant to see light, the large plain light of day all about him. He felt 
as if he were floating on that light, or drifting in a boat on very quiet waters. At last he made out that he 
was in bed, but no such bed as he had ever slept in. It was set up on a frame held by four tall carven legs, 
and the mattresses were great silk sacks of down, which was why he thought he was floating, and over it 
all a crimson canopy hung to keep out drafts. On two sides the curtain was tied back, and Ged looked 
out at a room with walls of stone and floor of stone. Through three high windows he saw the moorland, 
bare and ` brown, snow-patched here and there, in the mild sunlight of winter. The room must be high 
above the ground, for it looked a great way over the land. 
A coverlet of downfllled satin slid aside as Ged sat up, and he saw himself clothed in a tunic of silk 
and cloth-of-silver like a lord. On a chair beside the bed, boots of glove-leather and a cloak lined with 
pellawi-fur were laid ready for him. He sat a while, calm and dull as one under an enchantment, and then 
stood up, reaching for his staff. But he had no staff. 
His right hand, though it had been salved and bound, was burned on palm and fingers. Now he felt 
the pain of it, and the soreness of all his body. 
He stood without moving a while again. Then he whispered, not aloud and not hopefully, "Hoeg... 
hoeg..." For the little fierce loyal creature too was gone, the little silent soul that once had led him back 
from death's dominion. Had it still been with him last night when he ran? Was that last night, was it 
many nights ago? He did not know. It was all dim and obscure in his mind, the gebbeth, the burning 
staff, the running, the whispering, the gate. None of it came back clearly to him. Nothing even now was 
clear. He whispered his pet's name once more, but without hope of answer, and tears rose in his eyes. 

 A little bell rang somewhere far away. A second bell rang in a sweet jangle just outside the room. A 
door opened behind him, across the room, and a woman came in. ""Welcome, Sparrowhawk," she said 
smiling. 
She was young and tall, dressed in white and silver, with a net of silver crowning her hair that fell 
straight down like a fall of black water. 
Stiffly Ged bowed. 
"You, don't remember me, I think." 
"Remember you, Lady?" 
He had never seen a beautiful woman dressed to match her beauty but once in his life: that Lady of 
O who had come with her Lord to the Sunretum festival at Roke. She had been like a slight, bright 
candle-flame, but this woman was like the white new moon. 
"I thought you would not," she said smiling. "But forgetful as you may be, you're welcome here as 
an old friend." 
"What place is this?" Ged asked, still stiff and slow-tongued. He found it hard to speak to her and 
hard to look away from her. The princely clothes he wore were strange to him, the stones he stood on 
were unfamiliar, the very air he breathed was alien; he was not himself, not the self he had been. 
"This keep is called the Court of the Terrenon. My lord, who is called Benderesk, is sovereign of 
this land from the edge of the Keksemt Moors north to the Mountains of Os, and keeper of the precious 
stone called Terrenon. As for myself, here in Osskil they call me Serret, Silver in their language. And 
you, I know, are sometimes called Sparrowhawk, and were made wizard in the Isle of the Wise." 
Ged looked down at his burned hand and said presently, "I do not know what I am. I had power, 
once. I have lost it, I think." 
"No! you have not lost it, or only to regain it ten fold. You are safe here from what drove you here, 
my friend. There are mighty walls about this tower and not all of them are built of stone. Here you can 
rest, finding your strength again. Here you may also find a different strength, and a staff that will not 
burn to ashes in your hand. An evil way may lead to a good end, after all. Come with me now, let me 
show you our domain." 
She spoke so sweetly that Ged hardly heard her words, moved by the promise of her voice alone. 
He followed her. 
His room was high up indeed in the tower that rose like a sharp tooth from its hilltop. Down 
winding stairs of marble he followed Serret, through rich rooms and halls, past high windows that 
looked north, west, south, east over the low brown hills that went on, houseless and treeless and 
changeless, clear to the sunwashed winter sky. Only far to the north small white peaks stood sharp 
against the blue, and southward one could guess the shining of the sea. 
Servants opened doors and stood aside for Ged and the lady; pale, dour Osskilians they were all. 
She was light of skin, but unlike them she spoke Hardic well, even, it seemed to Ged, with the accent of 
Gont. Later that day she brought him before her husband Benderesk, Lord of the Terrenon. Thrice her 
age, bonewhite, bone-thin, with clouded eyes, Lord Benderesk greeted Ged with grim cold courtesy, 
bidding him stay as guest however long he would. Then he had little more to say, asking Ged nothing of 
his voyages or of the enemy that had hunted him here; nor had the Lady Serret asked anything of these 
matters. 
If this was strange, it was only part of the strangeness of this place and of his presence in it. Geds 
mind never seemed quite to clear. He could not see things plainly. He had come to this tower-keep by 

chance, and yet the chance was all design; or he had come by design and yet all the design had merely 
chanced to come about. He had set out northward; a stranger in Orrimy had told him to seek help here; 
an Osskilian ship had been waiting for him; Skiorh had guided him. How much of this was the work of 
the shadow that hunted him? Or was none of it; had he and his hunter both been drawn here by some 
other power, he following that lure and the shadow following him, and seizing on Skiorh for its weapon 
when the moment came? That must be it, for certainly the shadow was, as Serret had said, barred from 
the Court of the Terrenon. He had felt no sign or threat of its lurking presence since he wakened in the 
tower. But what then had brought him here? For this was no place one came to by chance; even in the 
dullness of his thoughts he began to see that. No other stranger came to these gates. The tower stood 
aloof and remote, its back turned on the way to Neshum that was the nearest town. No man came to the 
keep, none left it. Its windows looked down on desolation. 
From these windows Ged looked out, as he kept by himself in his high tower-room, day after day, 
dull and heartsick and cold. It was always cold in the tower, for all the carpets and the tapestried 
hangings and the rich furred clothing and the broad marble fireplaces they had. It was a cold that got into 
the bone, into the marrow, and would not be dislodged. And in Ged's heart a cold shame settled also and 
would not be dislodged, as he thought always how he had faced his enemy and been defeated and had 
run. In his mind all the Masters of Roke gathered, Gensher the Archmage frowning in their midst, and 
Nemmerle was with them, and Ogion, and even the witch who had taught him his first spell: all of them 
gazed at him and he knew he had failed their trust in him. He would plead saying, "If I had not run away 
the shadow would have possessed me: it had already all Skiorh's strength, and part of mine, and I could 
not fight it: it knew my name. I had to run away. A wizard-gebbeth would be a terrible power for evil 
and ruin. I had to run away." But none of those who listened in his mind would answer him. And he 
would watch the snow falling, thin and ceaseless, on the empty lands below the window, and feel the 
dull cold grow within him, till it seemed no feeling was left to him except a kind of weariness. 
So he kept to himself for many days out of sheer misery. When he did come down out of his room, 
he was silent and stiff. The beauty of the Lady of the Keep confused his mind, and in this rich, seemly, 
orderly, strange Court, he felt himself to be a goatherd born and bred. 
They let him alone when he wanted to be alone, and when he could not stand to think his thoughts 
and watch the falling snow any longer, often Serret met with him in one of the curving halls, tapestried 
and firelit, lower in the tower, and there they would talk. There was no merriment in the Lady of the 
Keep, she never laughed though she often smiled; yet she could put Ged at ease almost with one smile. 
With her he began to forget his stiffness and his shame. Before long they met every day to talk, long, 
quietly, idly, a little apart from the serving-women who always accompanied Serret, by the fireplace or 
at the window of the high rooms of the tower. 
The old lord kept mostly in his own apartments, coming forth mornings to pace up and down the 
snowy inner courtyards of the castle-keep like an old sorcerer who has been brewing spells all night. 
When he joined Ged and Serret for supper he sat silent, looking up at his young wife sometimes with a 
hard, covetous glance. Then Ged pitied her. She was like a white deer caged, like a white bird 
wingclipped, like a silver ring on an old man's finger. She was an item of Benderesk's hoard. When the 
lord of the keep left them Ged stayed with her, trying to cheer her solitude as she had cheered his. 
"What is this jewel that gives your keep its name?" he asked her as they sat talking over their 
emptied gold plates and gold goblets in the carvernous, candlelit dining-hall. 
"You have not beard of it? It is a famous thing." 

 "No. I know only that the lords of Osskil have famous treasuries." 
"Ah, this jewel outshines them all. Come, would you like to see it?" 
She smiled, with a look of mockery and daring, as if a little afraid of what she did, and led the 
young man from the hall, out through the narrow corridors of the base of the tower, and down stairs 
underground to a locked door he had not seen before. This she unlocked with a silver key, looking up at 
Ged with that same smile as she did so, as if she dared him to come on with her. Beyond the door was a 
short passage and a second door, which she unlocked with a gold key, and beyond that again a third 
door, which she unlocked with one of the Great Words of unbinding. Within that last door her candle 
showed them a small room like a dungeon-cell: floor, walls, ceiling all rough stone, unfurnished, blank. 
"Do you see it?" Serret asked. 
As Ged looked round the room his wizard's eye caught one stone of those that made the floor. It 
was rough and dank as the rest, a heavy unshapen paving-stone: yet he felt the power of it as if it spoke 
to him aloud. And his breath caught in his throat, and a sickness came over him for a moment. This was 
the foundingstone of the tower. This was the central place, and it was cold, bitter cold; nothing could 
ever warm the little room. This was a very ancient thing: an old and terrible spirit was prisoned in that 
block of stone. He did not answer Serret yes or no, but stood still, and presently, with a quick curious 
glance at him, she pointed out the stone. "That is the Terrenon. Do you wonder that we keep so precious 
a jewel locked away in our deepest boardroom?" 
Still Ged did not answer, but stood dumb and wary. She might almost have been testing him; but he 
thought she had no notion of the stone's nature, to speak of it so lightly. She did not know enough of it to 
fear it. "Tell me of its powers," he said at last. 
"It was made before Segoy raised the islands of the world from the Open Sea. It was made when 
the world itself was made, and will endure until the end of the world. Time is nothing to it. If you lay 
your hand upon it and ask a question of it, it will answer, according to the power that is in you. It has a 
voice, if you know how to listen. It will speak of things that were, and are, and will be. It told of your 
coming, long before you came to this land. Will you ask a question of it now?" 
"No." 
"It will answer you." 
"There is no question I would ask it" 
"It might tell you," Serret said in her soft voice, "how you will defeat your enemy." 
Ged stood mute. 
"Do you fear the stone?" she asked as if unbelieving; and he answered, "Yes." 
In the deadly cold and silence of the room encircled by wall after wall of spellwork and of stone, in 
the light of the one candle she held, Serret glanced at him again with gleaming eyes. "Sparrowhawk," 
she said, "you are not afraid." 
"But I will not speak with that spirit," Ged replied, and looking full at her spoke with a grave 
boldness: "My lady, that spirit is sealed in a stone, and the stone is locked by binding-spell and blindingspell 
and charm of lock and ward and triple fortress-walls in a barren land, not because it is precious, but 
because it can work great evil. I do not know what they told you of it when you came here. But you who 
are young and gentle-hearted should never touch the thing, or even look on it. It will not work you well." 
"I have touched it. I have spoken to it, and heard it speak. It does me no harm." 
She turned away and they went out through the doors and passages till in the torchlight of the broad 
stairs of the tower she blew out her candle. They parted with few words. 

 That night Ged slept little. It was not the thought of the shadow that kept him awake; rather that 
thought was almost driven from his mind by the image, ever returning, of the Stone on which this tower 
was founded, and by the vision of Serret's face bright and shadowy in the candlelight, turned to him. 
Again and again he felt her eyes on him, and tried to decide what look had come into those eyes when he 
refused to touch the Stone, whether it had been disdain or hurt. When he lay down to sleep at last the 
silken sheets of the bed were cold as ice, and ever he wakened in the dark thinking of the Stone and of 
Serret's eyes. 
Next day he found her in the curving hall of grey marble, lit now by the westering sun, where often 
she spent the afternoon at games or at the weaving-loom with her maids. He said to her, "Lady Serret, I 
affronted you. I am sorry for it." 
"No," she said musingly, and again, "No ...." She sent away the serving-women who were with her, 
and when they were alone she turned to Ged. "My guest, my friend," she said, "you are very clearsighted, 
but perhaps you do not see all that is to be seen. In Gont, in Roke they teach high wizardries. 
But they do not teach all wizardries. This is Osskil, Ravenland: it is not a Hardic land: mages do not rule 
it, nor do they know much of it. There are happenings here not dealt with by the loremasters of the 
South, and things here not named in the Namers' lists. What one does not know, one fears. But you have 
nothing to fear here in the Court of the Terrenon. A weaker man would, indeed. Not you. You are one 
born with the power to control that which is in the sealed room. This I know. It is why you are here 
now." 
"I do not understand." 
"That is because my lord Benderesk has not been wholly frank with you. I will be frank. Come, sit 
by me here." 
He sat down beside her on the deep, cushioned window-ledge. The dying sunlight came level 
through the window, flooding them with a radiance in which there was no warmth; on the moorlands 
below, already sinking into shadow, last night's snow lay unmelted, a dull white pall over the earth. 
She spoke now very softly. "Benderesk is Lord and Inheritor of the Terrenon, but he cannot use the 
thing, he cannot make it wholly serve his will. Nor can I, alone or with him. Neither he nor I has the skill 
and power. You have both." 
"How do you know that?" 
"From the Stone itself! I told you that it spoke of your coming. It knows its master. It has waited for 
you to come. Before ever you were born it waited for you, for the one who could master it. And he who 
can make the Terrenon answer what he asks and do what he wills, has power over his own destiny: 
strength to crush any enemy, mortal or of the other world: foresight, knowledge, wealth, dominion, and a 
wizardry at his command that could humble the Archmage himself! As much of that, as little of that as 
you choose, is yours for the asking." 
Once more she lifted her strange bright eyes to him, and her gaze pierced him so that he trembled 
as if with cold. Yet there was fear in her face, as if she sought his help but was too proud to ask it. Ged 
was bewildered. She had put her hand on his as she spoke; its touch was light, it looked narrow and fair 
on his dark, strong hand. He said, pleading, "Serret! I have no such power as you think - what I had 
once, I threw away. I cannot help you, I am no use to you. But I know this, the Old Powers of earth are 
not for men to use. They were never given into our hands, and in our hands they work only ruin. Ill 
means, ill end: I was not drawn here, but driven here, and the force that drove me works to my undoing. 
I cannot help you." 

 "He who throws away his power is filled sometimes with a far greater power," she said, smiling, as 
if his fears and scruples were childish ones. "I may know more than you of what brought you here. Did 
not a man speak to you in the streets of Orrimy? He was a messenger, a servant of the Terrenon. He was 
a wizard once himself, but he threw away his staff to serve a power greater than any mage's. And you 
came to Osskil, and on the moors you tried to fight a shadow with your wooden staff; and almost we 
could not save you, for that thing that follows you is more cunning than we deemed, and had taken much 
strength from you already... Only shadow can fight shadow. Only darkness can defeat the dark. Listen, 
Sparrowhawk! what do you need, then, to defeat that shadow, which waits for you outside these walls?" 
"I need what I cannot know. Its name." 
"The Terrenon, that knows all births and deaths and beings before and after death, the unborn and 
the undying, the bright world and the dark one, will tell you that name." 
"And the price?" 
"There is no price. I tell you it will obey you, serve you as your slave." 
Shaken and tormented, he did not answer. She held his hand now in both of hers, looking into his 
face. The sun had fallen into the mists that dulled the horizon, and the air too had grown dull, but her 
face grew bright with praise and triumph as she watched him and saw his will shaken within him. Softly 
she whispered, "You will be mightier than all men, a king among men. You will rule, and I will rule 
with you-" 
Suddenly Ged stood up, and one step forward took him where he could see, just around the curve of 
the long room's wall, beside the door, the Lord of the Terrenon who stood listening and smiling a little. 
Ged's eyes cleared, and his mind. He looked down at Serret. "It is light that defeats the dark," he 
said stammering,- "light." 
As he spoke be saw, as plainly as if his own words were the light that showed him, how indeed he 
had been drawn here, lured here, how they had used his fear to lead him on, and how they would, once 
they had him, have kept him. They had saved him from the shadow, indeed, for they did not want him to 
be possessed by the shadow until he had become a slave of the Stone. Once his will was captured by the 
power of the Stone, then they would let the shadow into the walls, for a gebbeth was a better slave even 
than a man. If he had once touched the Stone, or spoken to it, he would have been utterly lost. Yet, even 
as the shadow had not quite been able to catch up with him and seize him, so the Stone had not been able 
to use him - not quite. He had almost yielded, but not quite. He had not consented. It is very hard for evil 
to take hold of the unconsenting soul. 
He stood between the two who had yielded, who had consented, looking from one to the other as 
Benderesk came forward. 
"I told you," the Lord of the Terrenon said dry-voiced to his lady, "that he would slip from your 
hands, Serret. They are clever fools, your Gontish sorcerers. And you are a fool too, woman of Gont, 
thinking to trick both him and me, and rule us both by your beauty, and use the Terrenon to your own 
ends. But I am the Lord of the Stone, I, and this I do to the disloyal wife: Ekavroe ai oelwantar-" It was a 
spell of Changing, and Benderesk's long hands were raised to shape the cowering woman into some 
hideous thing, swine or dog or drivelling hag. Ged stepped forward and struck the lord's hands down 
with his own, saying as he did so only one short word. And though he had no staff, and stood on alien 
ground and evil ground, the domain of a dark-power, yet his will prevailed. Benderesk stood still, his 
clouded eyes fixed hateful and unseeing upon Serret. 
"Come," she said in a shaking voice, "Sparrowhawk, come, quick, before he can summon the 

Servants of the Stone-" 
As if in echo a whispering ran through the tower, through the stones of the floor and walls, a dry 
trembling murmur, as if the earth itself should speak. 
Seizing Ged's hand Serret ran with him through the passages and halls, down the long twisted 
stairs. They came out into the courtyard where a last silvery daylight still hung above the soiled, trodden 
snow. Three of the castle-servants barred their way, sullen and questioning, as if they had been 
suspecting some plot of these two against their master. "It grows dark, Lady," one said, and another, 
"You cannot ride out now." 
"Out of my way, filth!" Serret cried, and spoke in the sibilant Osskilian speech. The men fell back 
from her and crouched down to the ground, writhing, and one of them screamed aloud. 
"We must go out by the gate, there is no other way out. Can you see it? can you find it, 
Sparrowhawk?" 
She tugged at his hand, yet he hesitated. "What spell did you set on them?" 
"I ran hot lead in the marrow of their bones, they will die of it. Quick, I tell you, he will loose the 
Servants of the Stone, and I cannot find the gate - there is a great charm on it. Quick!" 
Ged did not know what she meant, for to him the enchanted gate was as plain to see as the stone 
archway of the court through which he saw it. He led Serret through the one, across the untrodden snow 
of the forecourt, and then, speaking a word of Opening, he led her through the gate of the wall of spells. 
She changed as they passed through that doorway out of the silvery twilight of the Court of the 
Terrenon. She was not less beautiful in the drear light of the moors, but there was a fierce witch-look to 
her beauty; and Ged knew her at last - the daughter of the Lord of the Re Albi, daughter of a sorceress of 
Osskil, who had mocked him in the green meadows above Ogion's house, long ago, and had sent him to 
read that spell which loosed the shadow. But he spent small thought on this, for he was looking about 
him now with every sense alert, looking for that enemy, the shadow, which would be waiting for him 
somewhere outside the magic walls. It might be gebbeth still, clothed in Skiorh's death, or it might be 
hidden in the gathering darkness, waiting to seize him and merge its shapelessness with his living flesh. 
He sensed its nearness, yet did not see it. But as he looked he saw some small dark thing half buried in 
snow, a few paces from the gate. He stooped, and then softly picked it up in his two hands. It was the 
otak, its fine short fur all clogged with blood and its small body light and stiff and cold in his hands. 
"Change yourself! Change yourself, they are coming!" Serret shrieked, seizing his arm and pointing 
to the tower that stood behind them like a tall white tooth in the dusk. From slit windows near its base 
dark creatures were creeping forth, flapping long wings, slowly beating and circling up over the walls 
towards Ged and Serret where they stood on the hill-side, unprotected. The rattling whisper they had 
heard inside the keep had grown louder, a tremor and moaning in the earth under their feet. 
Anger welled up in Ged's heart, a hot rage of hate against all the cruel deathly things that tricked 
him, trapped him, hunted him down. "Change yourself!" Serret screamed at him, and she with a quickgasped 
spell shrank into a grey gull, and flew. But Ged stooped and plucked a blade of wild grass that 
poked up dry and frail out of the snow where the otak had lain dead. This blade he held up, and as he 
spoke aloud to it in the True Speech it lengthened, and thickened, and when he was done he held a great 
staff, a wizard's staff, in his hand. No banefire burned red along it when the black, flapping creatures 
from the Court of the Terrenon swooped over him and he struck their wings with it: it blazed only with 
the white magefire that does not burn but drives away the dark. 
The creatures returned to the attack: botched beasts, belonging to ages before bird or dragon or 

man, long since forgotten by the daylight but recalled by the ancient, malign, unforgetful power of the 
Stone. They harried Ged, swooping at him. He felt the scythe-sweep of their talons about him and 
sickened in their dead stench. Fiercely he parried and struck, fighting them off with the fiery staff that 
was made of his anger and a blade of wild grass. And suddenly they all rose up like ravens frightened 
from carrion and wheeled away, flapping, silent, in the direction that Serret in her gull-shape had flown. 
Their vast wings seemed slow, but they flew fast, each downbeat driving them mightily through the air. 
No gull could long outmatch that heavy speed. 
Quick as he had once done at Roke, Ged took the shape of a great hawk: not the sparrowhawk they 
called him but the Pilgrim Falcon that flies like arrow, like thought. On barred, sharp, strong wings he 
flew, pursuing his pursuers. The air darkened and among the clouds stars shone brightening. Ahead he 
saw the black ragged flock all driving down and in upon one point in mid-air. Beyond that black clot the 
sea lay, pale with last ashy gleam of day. Swift and straight the hawk-Ged shot towards the creatures of 
the Stone, and they scattered as he came amongst them as waterdrops scatter from a cast pebble. But 
they had caught their prey. Blood was on the beak of this one and white feathers stuck to the claws of 
another, and no gull skimmed beyond them over the pallid sea. 
Already they were turning on Ged again, coming quick and ungainly with iron beaks stretched out 
agape. He, wheeling once above them, screamed the hawk's scream of defiant rage, and then shot on 
across the low beaches of Osskil, out over the breakers of the sea. 
The creatures of the Stone circled a while croaking, and one by one beat back ponderously inland 
over the moors. The Old Powers will not cross over the sea, being bound each to an isle, a certain place, 
cave or stone or welling spring. Back went the black emanations to the tower-keep, where maybe the 
Lord of the Terrenon, Benderesk, wept at their return, and maybe laughed. But Ged went on, falconwinged, 
falcon-mad, like an unfalling arrow, like an unforgotten thought, over the Osskil Sea and 
eastward into the wind of winter and the night. 
Ogion the Silent had come home late to Re Albi from his autumn wanderings. More silent, more 
solitary than ever he had become as the years went on. The new Lord of Gont down in the city below 
had never got a word out of him, though he had climbed clear up to the Falcon's Nest to seek the help of 
the mage in a certain piratic venture towards the Andrades. Ogion who spoke to spiders on their webs 
and had been seen to greet trees courteously never said a word to the Lord of the Isle, who went away 
discontented. There was perhaps some discontent or unease also in Ogion's mind, for he had spent all 
summer and autumn alone up on the mountain, and only now near Sunretum was come back to his 
hearthside. 
The morning after his return he rose late, and wanting a cup of rushwash tea he went out to fetch 
water from the spring that ran a little way down the hillside from his house. The margins of the spring's 
small lively pool were frozen, and the sere moss among the rocks was traced with flowers of frost. It was 
broad daylight, but the sun would not clear the mighty shoulder of the mountain for an hour yet: all 
western Gont, from sea-beaches to the peak, was sunless, silent, and clear in the winter morning. As the 
mage stood by the spring looking out over the falling lands and the harbor and the grey distances of the 
sea, wings beat above him. He looked up, raising one arm a little. A great hawk came down with 
loudbeating wings and lighted on his wrist. Like a trained hunting-bird it clung there, but it wore no 
broken leash, no band or bell. The claws dug hard in Ogion's wrist; the barred wings trembled; the 
round, gold eye was dull and wild. 

 "Are you messenger or message?" Ogion said gently to the hawk. "Come on with me-" As he spoke 
the hawk looked at him. Ogion was silent a minute. "I named you once, I think," he said, and then strode 
to his house and entered, bearing the bird still on his wrist. He made the hawk stand on the hearth in the 
fire's heat, and offered it water. It would not drink. Then Ogion began to lay a spell, very quietly, 
weaving the web of magic with his hands more than with words. When the spell was whole and woven 
he said softly,- "Ged," -not looking at the falcon on the hearth. He waited some while, then turned, and 
got up, and went to the young man who stood trembling and dull-eyed before the fire. 
Ged was richly and outlandishly dressed in fur and silk and silver, but the clothes were torn and 
stiff with seasalt, and he stood gaunt and stooped, his hair lank about his scarred face. 
Ogion took the soiled, princely cloak off his shoulders, led him to the alcove-room where his 
prentice once had slept and made him lie down on the pallet there, and so with a murmured sleep-charm 
left him. He had said no word to him, knowing that Ged had no human speech in him now. 
As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic 
whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a 
wizard he had learned the price of the game, which is the peril of losing one's self, playing away the 
truth. The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater this peril. Every prentice-sorcerer learns 
the tale of the wizard Bordger of Way, who delighted in taking bear's shape, and did so more and more 
often until the bear grew in him and the man died away, and he became a bear, and killed his own little 
son in the forests, and was hunted down and slain. And no one knows how many of the dolphins that 
leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name 
in the joy of the restless sea. 
Ged had taken hawk-shape in fierce distress and rage, and when he flew from Osskil there had been 
but one thought in his mind: to outfly both Stone and shadow, to escape the cold treacherous lands, to go 
home. The falcon's anger and wildness were like his own, and had become his own, and his will to fly 
had become the falcon's will. Thus he had passed over Enlad, stooping down to drink at a lonely forest 
pool, but on the wing again at once, driven by fear of the shadow that came behind him. So he had 
crossed the great sea-lane called the jaws of Enlad, and gone on and on, east by south, the hills of 
Oranea faint to his right and the hills of Andrad fainter to his left, and before him only the sea; until at 
last, ahead, there rose up out of the waves one unchanging wave, towering always higher, the white peak 
of Gont. In all the sunlight and the dark of that great fight he had worn the falcon's wings, and looked 
through the falcon's eyes, and forgetting his own thoughts he had known at last only what the falcon 
knows: hunger, the wind, the way he flies. 
He flew to the right haven. There were few on Roke and only one on Gont who could have made 
him back into a man. 
He was savage and silent when he woke. Ogion never spoke to him, but gave him meat and water 
and let him sit hunched by the fire, grim as a great, weary, sulking hawk. When night came he slept. On 
the third morning he came in to the fireside where the mage sat gazing at the flames, and said, "Master..." 
"Welcome, lad," said Ogion. 
"I have come back to you as I left: a fool," the young man said, his voice harsh and thickened. The 
mage smiled a little and motioned Ged to sit across the hearth from him, and set to brewing them some 
tea. 
Snow was falling, the flrst of the winter here on the lower slopes of Gont. Ogion's windows were 
shuttered fast, but they could hear the wet snow as it fell soft on the roof, and the deep stillness of snow 

all about the house. A long time they sat there by the fire, and Ged told his old master the tale of the 
years since he had sailed from Gont aboard the ship called Shadow. Ogion asked no questions, and when 
Ged was done he kept silent for a long time, calm, pondering. Then he rose, and set out bread and cheese 
and wine on the table, and they ate together. When they had done and had set the room straight, Ogion 
spoke. 
"Those are bitter scars you bear, lad," he said. 
"I, have no strength against the thing," Ged answered. 
Ogion shook his head but said no more for a time. At length, "Strange," he said: "You had strength 
enough to outspell a sorcerer in his own domain, there in Osskil. You had strength enough to withstand 
the lures and fend off the attack of the servants of an Old Power of Earth. And at Pendor you had 
strength enough to stand up to a dragon." 
"It was luck I had in Osskil, not strength," Ged replied, and he shivered again as he thought of the 
dreamlike deathly cold of the Court of the Terrenon. "As for the dragon, I knew his name. The evil 
thing, the shadow that hunts me, has no name." 
"All things have a name," said Ogion, so certainly that Ged dared not repeat what the Archmage 
Gensher had told him, that such evil forces as he had loosed were nameless. The Dragon of Pendor, 
indeed, had offered to tell him the shadow's name, but he put little trust in the truth of that offer, nor did 
he believe Serret's promise that the Stone would tell him what he needed to know. 
"If the shadow has a name," he said at last, "I do not think it will stop and tell it to me..." 
"No," said Ogion. "Nor have you stopped and told it your name. And yet it knew it. On the moors 
in Osskil it called you by your name, the name I gave you. It is strange, strange..." 
He fell to brooding again. At last Ged said, "I came here for counsel, not for refuge, Master. I will 
not bring this shadow upon you, and it will soon be here if I stay. Once you drove it from this very 
room-" 
"No; that was but the foreboding of it, the shadow of a shadow. I could not drive it forth, now. Only 
you could do that." 
"But I am powerless before it. Is there any place..." His voice died away before he had asked the 
question. 
"There is no safe place," Ogion said gently. "Do not transform yourself again, Ged. The shadow 
seeks to destroy your true being. It nearly did so, driving you into hawk's being. No, where you should 
go, I do not know. Yet I have an idea of what you should do. It is a hard thing to say to you." 
Ged's silence demanded truth, and Ogion said at last, "You must turn around." 
"Turn around?" 
"If you go ahead, if you keep running, wherever you run you will meet danger and evil, for it drives 
you, it chooses the way you go. You must choose. You must seek what seeks you. You must hunt the 
hunter." 
Ged said nothing. 
"At the spring of the River Ar I named you," the mage said, "a stream that falls from the mountain 
to the sea. A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to 
his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in 
the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea. You returned to 
Gont, you returned to me, Ged. Now turn clear round, and seek the very source, and that which lies 
before the source. There lies your hope of strength." 

 "There, Master?" Ged said with terror in his voice"Where?" 
Ogion did not answer. 
"If I turn," Ged said after some time had gone by, "if as you say I hunt the hunter, I think the hunt 
will not be long. All its desire is to meet me face to face. And twice it has done so, and twice defeated 
me." 
"Third time is the charm," said Ogion. 
Ged paced the room up and down, from fireside to door, from door to fireside. "And if it defeats me 
wholly," he said, arguing perhaps with Ogion perhaps with himself, "it will take my knowledge and my 
power, and use them. It threatens only me, now. But if it enters into me and possesses me, it will work 
great evil through me." 
"That is true. If it defeats you." 
"Yet if I run again, it will as surely find me again... And all my strength is spent in the running." 
Ged paced on a while, and then suddenly turned, and kneeling down before the mage he said, "I have 
walked with great wizards and have lived on the Isle of the Wise, but you are my true master, Ogion." 
He spoke with love, and with a somber joy. 
"Good," said Ogion. "Now you know it. Better now than never. But you will be my master, in the 
end." He got up, and built up the fire to a good blaze, and hung the kettle over it to boil, and then pulling 
on his sheepskin coat said, "I must go look after my goats. Watch the kettle for me, lad." 
When he came back in, all snow-powdered and stamping snow from his goatskin boots, he carried 
a long, rough shaft of yew-wood. All the end of the short afternoon, and again after their supper, he sat 
working by lampfire on the shaft with knife and rubbing-stone and spell-craft. Many times he passed his 
hands along the wood as if seeking any flaw. Often as he worked he sang softly. Ged, still weary, 
listened, and as he grew sleepy he thought himself a child in the witch's but in Ten Alders village, on a 
snowy night in the firelit dark, the air heavy with herb-scent and smoke, and his mind all adrift on 
dreams as he listened to the long soft singing of spells and deeds of heroes who fought against dark 
powers and won, or lost, on distant islands long ago. 
"There," said Ogion, and handed the finished staff to him. "The Archmage gave you yew-wood, a 
good choice and I kept to it. I meant the shaft for a longbow, but it's better this way. Good night, my 
son." 
As Ged, who found no words to thank him, turned away to his alcove-room, Ogion watched him 
and said, too soft for Ged to hear, "O my young falcon, fly well!" 
In the cold dawn when Ogion woke, Ged was gone. Only he had left in wizardly fashion a message 
of silver-scrawled runes on the hearthstone, that faded even as Ogion read them: "Master, I go 
hunting." 
------ 
8 Hunting 
------ 
Ged had set off down the road from Re Albi in the winter dark before sunrise, and before noon he 
came to the Port of Gont. Ogion had given him decent Gontish leggings and shirt and vest of leather and 

linen to replace his Osskilian finery, but Ged had kept for his winter journey the lordly cloak lined with 
pellawi-fur. So cloaked, empty-handed but for the dark staff that matched his height, he came to the 
Land Gate, and the soldiers lounging against the carven dragons there did not have to look twice at him 
to see the wizard. They drew aside their lances and let him enter without question, and watched him as 
he went on down the street. 
On the quays and in the House of the Sea-Guild he asked of ships that might be going out north or 
west to Enlad, Andrad, Oranea. All answered him that no ship would be leaving Gont Port now, so near 
Sunreturn, and at the Sea-Guild they told him that even fishingboats were not going out through the 
Armed Cliffs in the untrusty weather. 
They offered him dinner at the buttery there in the Sea-Guild; a wizard seldom has to ask for his 
dinner. He sat a while with those longshoremen, shipwrights, and weatherworkers, taking pleasure in 
their slow, sparse conversation, their grumbling Gontish speech. There was a great wish in him to stay 
here on Gont, and foregoing all wizardry and venture, forgetting all power and horror, to live in peace 
like any man on the known, dear ground of his home land. That was his wish; but his will was other. He 
did not stay long in the Sea-Guild, nor in the city, after he found there would be no ships out of port. He 
set out walking along the bay shore till he came to the first of the small villages that lie north of the City 
of Gont, and there he asked among the fishermen till he found one that had a boat to sell. 
The fisherman was a dour old man. His boat, twelve foot long and clinker-built, was so warped and 
sprung as to be scarce seaworthy, yet he asked a high price for her: the spell of sea-safety for a year laid 
on his own boat, himself, and his son. For Gontish fishermen fear nothing, not even wizards, only the 
sea. 
That spell of sea-safety which they set much store by in the Northern Archipelago never saved a 
man from stormwind or storm-wave, but, cast by one who knows the local seas and the ways of a boat 
and the skills of the sailor, it weaves some daily safety about the fisherman. Ged made the charm well 
and honestly, working on it all that night and the next day, omitting nothing, sure and patient, though all 
the while his mind was strained with fear and his thoughts went on dark paths seeking to imagine how 
the shadow would appear to him next, and how soon, and where. When the spell was made whole and 
cast, he was very weary. He slept that night in the fisherman's but in a whale-gut hammock, and got up 
at dawn smelling like a dried herring, and went down to the cove under Cutnorth Cliff where his new 
boat lay. 
He pushed it into the quiet water by the landing, and water began to well softly into it at once. 
Stepping into the boat light as a cat Ged set straight the warped boards and rotten pegs, working both 
with tools and incantations, as he had used to do with Pechvarry in Low Torning. The people of the 
village gathered in silence, not too close, to watch his quick hands and listen to his soft voice. This job 
too he did well and patiently until it was done and the boat was sealed and sound. Then he set up his 
staff that Ogion had made him for a mast, stayed it with spells, and fixed across it a yard of sound wood. 
Downward from this yard he wove on the wind's loom a sail of spells, a square sail white as the snows 
on Gont peak above. At this the women watching sighed with envy. Then standing by the mast Ged 
raised up the magewind lightly. The boat moved out upon the water, turning towards the Armed Cliffs 
across the great bay. When the silent watching fishermen saw that leaky rowboat slip out under sail as 
quick and neat as a sandpiper taking wing, then they raised a cheer, grinning and stamping in the cold 
wind on the beach; and Ged looking back a moment saw them there cheering him on, under the dark 
jagged bulk of Cutnorth Cliff, above which the snowy fields of the Mountain rose up into cloud. 

 He sailed across the bay and out between the Armed Cliffs onto the Gontish Sea, there setting his 
course northwestwards to pass north of Oranea, returning as he had come. He had no plan or strategy in 
this but the retracing of his course. Following his falcon-flight across the days and winds from Osskil, 
the shadow might wander or might come straight, there was no telling. But unless it had withdrawn 
again wholly into the dream-realm, it should not miss Ged coming openly, over open sea, to meet it. 
On the sea he wished to meet it, if meet it he must. He was not sure why this was, yet he had a 
terror of meeting the thing again on dry land. Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil 
powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, no running of river or spring, in the dark land where once 
Ged had gone. Death is the dry place. Though the sea itself was a danger to him in the hard weather of 
the season, that danger and change and instability seemed to him a defense and chance. And when he 
met the shadow in this final end of his folly, he thought, maybe at least he could grip the thing even as it 
gripped him, and drag it with the weight of his body and the weight of his own death down into the 
darkness of the deep sea, from which, so held, it might not rise again. So at least his death would put an 
end to the evil he had loosed by living. 
He sailed a rough chopping sea above which clouds drooped and drifted in vast mournful veils. He 
raised no magewind now but used the world's wind, which blew keen from the northwest; and so long as 
he maintained the substance of his spell-woven sail often with a whispered word, the sail itself set and 
turned itself to catch the wind. Had he not used that magic he would have been hard put to keep the 
crank little boat on such a course, on that rough sea. On he went, and kept keen look-out on all sides. 
The fisherman's wife had given him two loaves of bread and a jar of water, and after some hours, when 
he was first in sight of Kameber Rock, the only isle between Gont and Oranea, he ate and drank, and 
thought gratefully of the silent Gontishwoman who had given him the food. On past the dim glimpse of 
land he sailed, tacking more westerly now, in a faint dank drizzle that over land might be a light snow. 
There was no sound at all but the small creaking of the boat and light slap of waves on her bow. No boat 
or bird went by. Nothing moved but the ever-moving water and the drifting clouds, the clouds that he 
remembered dimly as flowing all about him as he, a falcon, flew east on this same course he now 
followed to the west; and he had looked down on the grey sea then as now he looked up at the grey air. 
Nothing was ahead when he looked around. He stood up, chilled, weary of this gazing and peering 
into empty murk. "Come then," he muttered, "come on, what do you wait for, Shadow?" There was no 
answer, no darker motion among the dark mists and waves. Yet he knew more and more surely now that 
the thing was not far off, seeking blindly down his cold trail. And all at once he shouted out aloud, "I am 
here, I Ged the Sparrowhawk, and I summon my shadow!" 
The boat creaked, the waves lisped, the wind hissed a little on the white sail. The moments went by. 
Still Ged waited, one hand on the yew-wood mast of his boat, staring into the icy drizzle that slowly 
drove in ragged lines across the sea from the north. The moments went by. Then, far off in the rain over 
the water, he saw the shadow coming. 
It had done with the body of the Osskilian oarsman Skiorh, and not as gebbeth did it follow him 
through he winds and over sea. Nor did it wear that beast-shape in which he had seen it on Roke Knoll, 
and in its dreams. Yet it had a shape now, even in the daylight. In its pursuit of Ged and in its struggle 
with him on the moors it had drawn power from him, sucking it into itself: and it may be that his 
summoning of it, aloud in the light of day, had given to it or forced upon it some form and semblance. 
Certainly it had now some likeness to a man, though being shadow it cast no shadow. So it came over 
the sea, out of the jaws of Enlad towards Gont, a dim ill-made thing pacing uneasy on the waves, 

peering down the wind as it came; and the cold rain blew through it. 
Because it was half blinded by the day, and because he had called it, Ged saw it before it saw him. 
he knew it, as it knew him, among all beings, all shadows. 
In the terrible solitude of the winter sea Ged stood and saw the thing he feared. The wind seemed to 
blow it farther from the boat, and the waves ran under it bewildering his eye, and ever and again it 
seemed closer to him. He could not tell if it moved or not. It had seen him, now. Though there was 
nothing a his mind but horror and fear of its touch, the cold black pain that drained his life away, yet he 
waited, unmoving. Then all at once speaking aloud he called the magewind strong and sudden into his 
white sail, and his boat leapt across the grey waves straight at the lowering thing that hung upon the 
wind. 
In utter silence the shadow, wavering, turned and fled. 
Upwind it went, northward. Upwind Ged's boat followed, shadow-speed against mage-craft, the 
rainy gale against them both. And the young man yelled to his boat, to the sail and the wind and the 
waves ahead, as a hunter yells to his bounds when the wolf runs in plain sight before them, and he 
brought into that spell-woven sail a wind that would have split any sail of cloth and that drove his boat 
over the sea like a scud of blown foam, closer always to the thing that fled. 
Now the shadow turned, making a half-circle, and appearing all at once more loose and dim, less 
like a man more like mere smoke blowing on the wind, it doubled back and ran downwind with the gale, 
as if it made for Gont. 
With hand and spell Ged turned his boat, and it leaped like a dolphin from the water, rolling, in that 
quick turn. Faster than before he followed, but the shadow grew ever fainter to his eyes. Rain, mixed 
with sleet and snow, came stinging across his back and his left cheek, and he could not see more than a 
hundred yards ahead. Before long, as the storm grew heavier, the shadow was lost to sight. Yet Ged was 
sure of its track as if he followed a beast's track over snow, instead of a wraith fleeing over water. 
Though the wind blew his way now he held the singing magewind in the sail, and flake-foam shot from 
the boat's blunt prow, and she slapped the water as she went. 
For a long time hunted and hunter held their weird, fleet course, and the day was darkening fast. 
Ged knew that at the great pace he had gone these past hours he must be south of Gont, heading past it 
towards Spevy or Torheven, or even past these islands out into the open Reach. He could not tell. He did 
not care. He hunted, he followed, and fear ran before him. 
All at once he saw the shadow for a moment not far from him. The world's wind had been sinking, 
and the driving sleet of the storm had given way to a chill, ragged, thickening mist. Through this mist he 
glimpsed the shadow, fleeing somewhat to the right of his course. He spoke to wind and sail and turned 
the tiller and pursued, though again it was a blind pursuit: the fog thickened fast, boiling and tattering 
where it met with the spellwind, closing down all round the boat, a featureless pallor that deadened light 
and sight. Even as Ged spoke the first word of a clearing-charm, he saw the shadow again, still to the 
right of his course but very near, and going slowly. The fog blew through the faceless vagueness of its 
head, yet it was shaped like a man, only deformed and changing, like a man's shadow. Ged veered the 
boat once more, thinking be had run his enemy to ground: in that instant it vanished, and it was his boat 
that ran aground, smashing up on shoal rocks that the blowing mist had hidden from his sight. He was 
pitched nearly out, but grabbed hold on the mast-staff before the next breaker struck. This was a great 
wave, which threw the little boat up out of water and brought her down on a rock, as a man might lift up 
and crush a snail's shell. 

 Stout and wizardly was the staff Ogion had shaped. It did not break, and buoyant as a dry log it 
rode the water. Still grasping it Ged was pulled back as the breakers streamed back from the shoal, so 
that he was in deep water and saved, till the next wave, from battering on the rocks. Salt-blinded and 
choked, he tried to keep his head up and to fight the enormous pull of the sea. There was sand beach a 
little aside of the rocks, be glimpsed this a couple of times as he tried to swim free of the rising of the 
next breaker. With all his strength and with the staff's power aiding him he struggled to make for that 
beach. He got no nearer. The surge and recoil of the swells tossed him back and forth like a rag, and the 
cold of the deep sea drew warmth fast from his body, weakening him till he could not move his arms. He 
had lost sight of rocks and beach alike, and did not know what way he faced. There was only a tumult of 
water around him, under him, over him, blinding him, strangling him, drowning him. 
A wave swelling in under the ragged fog took him and rolled him over and over and flung him up 
like a stick of driftwood on the sand. 
There he lay. He still clutched the yew-wood staff with both hands. Lesser waves dragged at him, 
trying to tug him back down the sand in their outgoing rush, and the mist parted and closed above him, 
and later a sleety rain beat on him. 
After a long time he moved. He got up on hands and knees, and began slowly crawling up the 
beach, away from the water's edge. It was black night now, but he whispered to the staff, and a little 
werelight clung about it. With this to guide him he struggled forward, little by little, up toward the 
dunes. He was so beaten and broken and cold that this crawling through the wet sand in the whistling, 
sea-thundering dark was the hardest thing he had ever had to do. And once or twice it seemed to him that 
the great noise of the sea and the wind all died away and the wet sand turned to dust under his hands, 
and he felt the unmoving gaze of strange stars on his back: but he did not lift his head, and he crawled 
on, and after a while he heard his own gasping breath, and felt the bitter wind beat the rain against his 
face. 
The moving brought a little warmth back into him at last, and after he had crept up into the dunes, 
where the gusts of rainy wind came less hard, he managed to get up on his feet. He spoke a stronger light 
out of the staff, for the world was utterly black, and then leaning on the staff he went on, stumbling and 
halting, half a mile or so inland. Then on the rise of a dune he heard the sea, louder again, not behind 
him but in front: the dunes sloped down again to another shore. This was no island he was on but a mere 
reef, a bit of sand in the midst of the ocean. 
He was too worn out to despair, but he gave a kind of sob and stood there, bewildered, leaning on 
his staff, for a long time. Then doggedly he turned to the left, so the wind would be at his back at least, 
and shuffled down the high dune, seeking some hollow among the ice-rimed, bowing sea-grass where he 
could have a little shelter. As he held up the staff to see what lay before him, he caught a dull gleam at 
the farthest edge of the circle of werelight: a wall of rain-wet wood. 
It was a hut or shed, small and rickety as if a child had built it. Ged knocked on the low door with 
his staff. It remained shut. Ged pushed it open and entered, stooping nearly double to do so. He could 
not stand up straight inside the hut. Coals lay red in the firepit, and by their dim glow Ged saw a man 
with white, long hair, who crouched in terror against the far wall, and another, man or woman he could 
not tell, peering from a heap of rags or hides on the floor. 
"I won't hurt you," Ged whispered. 
They said nothing. He looked from one to the other. Their eyes were blank with terror. When he 
laid down his staff, the one under the pile of rags hid whimpering. Ged took off his cloak that was heavy 

with water and ice, stripped naked and huddled over the firepit. "Give me something to wrap myself in," 
he said. He was hoarse, and could hardly speak for the chattering of his teeth and the long shudders that 
shook him. If they heard him, neither of the old ones answered. He reached out and took a rag from the 
bed-heap - a goat-hide, it might have been years ago, but it was now all tatters and black grease. The one 
under the bed-heap moaned with fear, but Ged paid no heed. He rubbed himself dry and then whispered, 
"Have you wood? Build up the fire a little, old man. I come to you in need, I mean you no harm." 
The old man did not move, watching him in a stupor of fear. 
"Do you understand me? Do you speak no Hardic?" Ged paused, and then asked, "Kargad?" 
At that word, the old man nodded all at once, one nod, like a sad old puppet on strings. But as it 
was the only word Ged knew of the Kargish language, it was the end of their conversation. He found 
wood piled by one wall, built up the fire himself, and then with gestures asked for water, for swallowing 
seawater had sickened him and now he was parched with thirst. Cringing, the old man pointed to a great 
shell that held water, and pushed towards the fire another shell in which were strips of smoke-dried fish. 
So, crosslegged close by the fire, Ged drank, and ate a little, and as some strength and sense began to 
come back into him, he wondered where he was. Even with the magewind he could not have sailed clear 
to the Kargad Lands. This islet must be out in the Reach, east of Gont but still west of Karego-At. It 
seemed strange that people dwelt on so small and forlorn a place, a mere sand-bar; maybe they were 
castaways; but he was too weary to puzzle his head about them then. 
He kept turning his cloak to the heat. The silvery pellawifur dried fast, and as soon as the wool of 
the facing was at least warm, if not dry, he wrapped himself in it and stretched out by the firepit. "Go to 
sleep, poor folk," he said to his silent hosts, and laid his head down on the floor of sand, and slept. 
Three nights he spent on the nameless isle, for the first morning when he woke he was sore in every 
muscle and feverish and sick. He lay like a log of driftwood in the but by the firepit all that day and 
night. The next morning he woke still stiff and sore, but recovered. He put back on his salt-crusted 
clothes, for there was not enough water to wash them, and going out into the grey windy morning looked 
over this place whereto the shadow had tricked him. 
It was a rocky sand-bar a mile wide at its widest and a little longer than that, fringed all about with 
shoals and rocks. No tree or bush grew on it, no plant but the bowing sea-grass. The but stood in a 
hollow of the dunes, and the old man and woman lived there alone in the utter desolation of the empty 
sea. The hut was built, or piled up rather, of driftwood planks and branches. Their water came from a 
little brackish well beside the but; their food was fish and shellfish, fresh or dried, and rockweed. The 
tattered hides in the but, and a little store of bone needles and fishhooks, and the sinew for fishlines and 
firedrill, came not from goats as Ged had thought at first, but from spotted seal; and indeed this was the 
kind of place where the seal will go to raise their pups in summer. But no one else comes to such a 
place. The old ones feared Ged not because they thought him a spirit, and not because he was a wizard, 
but only because he was a man. They had forgotten that there were other people in the world. 
The old man's sullen dread never lessened. When he thought Ged was coming close enough to 
touch him, he would hobble away, peering back with a scowl around his bush of dirty white hair. At first 
the old woman had whimpered and hidden under her rag-pile whenever Ged moved, but as he had lain 
dozing feverishly in the dark hut, he saw her squatting to stare at him with a strange, dull, yearning look; 
and after a while she had brought him water to drink. When he sat up to take the shell from her she was 
scared and dropped it, spilling all the water, and then she wept, and wiped her eyes with her long whitish

grey hair. 
Now she watched him as he worked down on the beach, shaping driftwood and planks from his 
boat that had washed ashore into a new boat, using the old man's crude stone adze and a binding-spell. 
This was neither a repair nor a boat-building, for he had not enough proper wood, and must supply all 
his wants with pure wizardry. Yet the old woman did not watch his marvellous work so much as she 
watched him, with that same craving look in her eyes. After a while she went off, and came back 
presently with a gift: a handful of mussels she had gathered on the rocks. Ged ate them as she gave them 
to him, sea-wet and raw, and thanked her. Seeming to gain courage, she went to the but and came back 
with something again in her hands, a bundle wrapped up in a rag. Timidly, watching his face all the 
while, she unwrapped the thing and held it up for him to see. 
It was a little child's dress of silk brocade stiff with seedpearls, stained with salt, yellow with years. 
On the small bodice the pearls were worked in a shape Ged knew: the double arrow of the God-Brothers 
of the Kargad Empire, surmounted by a king's crown. 
The old woman, wrinkled, dirty, clothed in an illsewn sack of sealskin, pointed at the little silken 
dress and at herself, and smiled: a sweet, unmeaning smile, like a baby's. From some hidingplace sewn 
in the skirt of the dress she took a small object, and this was held out to Ged. It was a bit of dark metal, a 
piece of broken jewelry perhaps, the half-circle of a broken ring. Ged looked at it, but she gestured that 
he take it, and was not satisfied until he took it; then she nodded and smiled again; she had made him a 
present. But the dress she wrapped up carefully in its greasy rag-coverings, and she shuffled back to the 
hut to hide the lovely thing away. 
Ged put the broken ring into his tunic-pocket with almost the same care, for his heart was full of 
pity. He guessed now that these two might be children of some royal house of the Kargad Empire; a 
tyrant or usurper who feared to shed kingly blood had sent them to be cast away, to live or die, on an 
uncharted islet far from Karego-At. One had been a boy of eight or ten, maybe, and the other a stout 
baby princess in a dress of silk and pearls; and they had lived, and lived on alone, forty years, fifty years, 
on a rock in the ocean, prince and princess of Desolation. 
But the truth of this guess he did not learn until, years later, the quest of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe 
led him to the Kargad Lands, and to the Tombs of Atuan. 
His third night on the isle lightened to a calm, pale sunrise. It was the day of Sunreturn, the shortest 
day of the year. His little boat of wood and magic, scraps and spells, was ready. He had tried to tell the 
old ones that he would take them to any land, Gont or Spevy or the Torikles; he would have left them 
even on some lonely shore of Karego-At, had they asked it of him, though Kargish waters were no safe 
place for an Archipelagan to venture. But they would not leave their barren isle. The old woman seemed 
not to understand what he meant with his gestures and quiet words; the old man did understand, and 
refused. All his memory of other lands and other men was a child's nightmare of blood and giants and 
screaming: Ged could see that in his face, as he shook his head and shook his head. 
So Ged that morning filled up a sealskin pouch with water at the well, and since he could not thank 
the old ones for their fire and food, and had no present for the old woman as he would have liked, he did 
what he could, and set a charm on that salty unreliable spring. The water rose up through the sand as 
sweet and clear as any mountain spring in the heights of Gont, nor did it ever fail. Because of it, that 
place of dunes and rocks is charted now and bears a name; sailors call it Springwater Isle. But the hut is 
gone, and the storms of many winters have left no sign of the two who lived out their lives there and 
died alone. 

 They kept hidden in the hut, as if they feared to watch, when Ged ran his boat out from the sandy 
south end of the isle. He let the world's wind, steady from the north, fill his sail of spellcloth, and went 
speedily forth over the sea. 
Now this sea-quest of Ged's was a` strange matter, for as he well knew, he was a hunter who knew 
neither what the thing was that he hunted, nor where in all Earthsea it might be. He must hunt it by 
guess, by hunch, by luck, even as it bad hunted him. Each was blind to the other's being, Ged as baffled 
by impalpable shadows as the shadow was baffled by daylight and by solid things. One certainty only 
Ged had: that he was indeed the hunter now and not the hunted. For the shadow, having tricked him onto 
the rocks, might have had him at its mercy all the while he lay half-dead on the shore and blundered in 
darkness in the stormy dunes; but it had not waited for that chance. It had tricked him and fled away at 
once, not daring now to face him. In this he saw that Ogion had been right: the shadow could not draw 
on his power, so long as he was turned against it. So he must keep against it, keep after it, though its 
track was cold across these wide seas, and he had nothing at all to guide him but the luck of the world's 
wind blowing southward, and a dim guess or notion in his mind that south or east was the right way to 
follow. 
Before nightfall he saw away off on his left hand the long, faint shoreline of a great land, which 
must be Karego-At. He was in the very sea-roads of those white barbaric folk. He kept a sharp watch out 
for any Kargish longship or galley; and he remembered, as he sailed through red evening, that morning 
of his boyhood in Ten Alders village, the plumed warriors; the fire, the mist. And thinking of that day he 
saw all at once, with a qualm at his heart, how the shadow had tricked him with his own trick, bringing 
that mist about him on the sea as if bringing it out of his own past, blinding him to danger and fooling 
him to his death. 
He kept his course to the southeast, and the land sank out of sight as night came over the eastern 
edge of the world. The hollows of the waves all were full of darkness while the crests shone yet with a 
clear ruddy reflection of the west. Ged sang aloud the Winter Carol, and such cantos of the Deed of the 
Young King as he remembered, for those songs are sung at the Festival of Sunreturn. His voice was 
clear, but it fell to nothing in the vast silence of the sea. Darkness came quickly, and the winter stars. 
All that longest night of the year he waked, watching the stars rise upon his left hand and wheel 
overhead and sink into far black waters on the right, while always the long wind of winter bore him 
southward over an unseen sea. He could sleep for only a moment now and then, with a sharp awakening. 
This boat he sailed was in truth no boat but a thing more than half charm and sorcery, and the rest of it 
mere planks and driftwood which, if he let slack the shapingspells and the binding-spell upon them, 
would soon enough lapse and scatter and go drifting off as a little flotsam on the waves. The sail too, 
woven of magic and the air, would not long stay against the wind if he slept, but would turn to a puff of 
wind itself. Ged's spells were cogent and potent, but when the matter on which such spells works is 
small, the power that keeps them working must be renewed from moment to moment: so he slept not 
that night. He would have gone easier and swifter as falcon or dolphin, but Ogion had advised him not to 
change his shape, and he knew the value of Ogion's advice. So he sailed southward under the west-going 
stars, and the long night passed slowly, until the first day of the new year brightened all the sea. 
Soon after the sun rose he saw land ahead, but he was making little way towards it. The world's 
wind had dropped with daybreak. He raised a light magewind into his sail, to drive him towards that 
land. At the sight of it, fear had come into him again, the sinking dread that urged him to turn away, to 
run away. And he followed that fear as a hunter follows the signs, the broad, blunt, clawed tracks of the 

bear, that may at any moment turn on him from the thickets. For he was close now: he knew it. 
It was a queer-looking land that loomed up over the sea as he drew nearer and nearer. What had 
from afar seemed to be one sheer mountainwall, was split into several long steep ridges, separate isles 
perhaps, between which the sea ran in narrow sounds or channels. Ged had pored over many charts and 
maps in the Tower of the Master Namer on Roke, but those had been mostly of the Archipelago and the 
inner seas. He was out in the East Reach now, and did not know what this island might be. Nor had he 
much thought for that. It was fear that lay ahead of him, that lurked hiding from him or waiting for him 
among the slopes and forests of the island, and straight for it he steered. 
Now the dark forest-crowned cliffs gloomed and towered high over his boat, and spray from the 
waves that broke against the rocky headlands blew spattering against his sail, as the magewind bore him 
between two great capes into a sound, a sea-lane that ran on before him deep into the island, no wider 
than the length of two galleys. The sea, confined, was restless and fretted at the steep shores. There were 
no beaches, for the cliffs dropped straight down into the water that lay darkened by the cold reflection of 
their heights. It was windless, and very silent. 
The shadow had tricked him out onto the moors in Osskil, and tricked him in the mist onto the 
rocks, and now would there be a third trick? Had he driven the thing here, or had it drawn him here, into 
a trap? He did not know. He knew only the torment of dread, and the certainty that he must go ahead and 
do what be had set out to do: hunt down the evil, follow his terror to its source. Very cautiously he 
steered, watching before him and behind him and up and down the cliffs on either hand. He had left the 
sunlight of the new day behind him on the open sea. All was dark here. The opening between the 
headlands seemed a remote, bright gateway when he glanced back. The cliffs loomed higher and ever 
higher overhead as he approached the mountain-root from which they sprang, and the lane of water grew 
narrower. He peered ahead into the dark cleft, and left and right up the great, cavern-pocked, bouldertumbled 
slopes where trees crouched with their roots half in air. Nothing moved. Now he was coming to 
the end of the inlet, a high blank wrinkled mass of rock against which, narrowed to the width of a little 
creek, the last sea-waves lapped feebly. Fallen boulders and rotten trunks and the roots of gnarled trees 
left only a tight way to steer. A trap: a dark trap under the roots of the silent mountain, and he was in the 
trap. Nothing moved before him or above him. All was deathly still. He could go no further. 
He turned the boat around, working her carefully round with spell and with makeshift oar lest she 
knock up against the underwater rocks or be entangled in the outreaching roots and branches, till she 
faced outward again; and he was about to raise up a wind to take him back as he had come, when 
suddenly the words of the spell froze on his lips, and his heart went cold within him. He looked back 
over his shoulder. The shadow stood behind him in the boat. 
Had he lost one instant, he had been lost; but he was ready, and lunged to seize and hold the thing 
which wavered and trembled there within arm's reach. No wizardry would serve him now, but only his 
own flesh, his life itself, against the unliving. He spoke no word, but attacked, and the boat plunged and 
pitched from his sudden turn and lunge. And a pain ran up his arms into his breast, taking away his 
breath, and an icy cold filled him, and he was blinded: yet in his hands that seized the shadow there was 
nothing - darkness, air. 
He stumbled forward, catching the mast to stay his fall, and light came shooting back into his eyes. 
He saw the shadow shudder away from him and shrink together, then stretch hugely up over him, over 
the sail, for an instant. Then like black smoke on the wind it recoiled and fled, formless, down the water 
towards the bright gate between the cliffs. 

 Ged sank to his knees. The little spell-patched boat pitched again, rocked itself to stillness, drifting 
on the uneasy waves. He crouched in it, numb, unthinking, struggling to draw breath, until at last cold 
water welling under his hands warned him that he must see to his boat, for the spells binding it were 
growing weak. He stood up, holding onto the staff that made the mast, and rewove the binding-spell as 
best he could. He was chilled and weary; his hands and arms ached sorely, and there was no power in 
him. He wished he might lie down there in that dark place where sea and mountain met and sleep, sleep 
on the restless rocking water. 
He could not tell if this weariness were a sorcery laid on him by the shadow as it fled, or came of 
the bitter coldness of its touch, or was from mere hunger and want of sleep and expense of strength; but 
he struggled against it, forcing himself to raise up a light magewind into the sail and follow down the 
dark sea-way where the shadow had fled. 
All terror was gone. All joy was gone. It was a chase no longer. He was neither hunted nor hunter, 
now. For the third time they had met and touched: he had of his own will turned to the shadow, seeking 
to hold it with living bands. He had not held it, but he had forged between them a bond, a link that had 
no breaking-point. There was no need to hunt the thing down, to track it, nor would its flight avail it. 
Neither could escape. When they had come to the time and place for their last meeting, they would meet. 
But until that time, and elsewhere than that place, there would never be any rest or peace for Ged, 
day or night, on earth or sea. He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to 
undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun. 
He sailed out from between the dark cliffs, and on the sea was broad, bright morning, with a fair 
wind blowing from the north. 
He drank what water he had left in the sealskin pouch, and steered around the westernmost 
headland until he came into a wide strait between it and a second island lying to the west. Then he knew 
the place, calling to mind sea-charts of the East Reach. These were the Hands, a pair of lonely isles that 
reach their mountain-fingers northward toward, the Kargad Lands. He sailed on between the two, and as 
the afternoon darkened with storm-clouds coming up from the north he came to shore, on the southern 
coast of the west isle. He had seen there was a little village there, above the beach where a stream came 
tumbling down to the sea, and he cared little what welcome he got if he could have water, fire's warmth, 
and sleep. 
The villagers were rough shy people, awed by a wizard's staff, wary of a strange face, but 
hospitable to one who came alone, over sea, before a storm. They gave him meat and drink in plenty, 
and the comfort of firelight and the comfort of human voices speaking his own Hardic tongue, and last 
and best they gave him hot water to wash the cold and saltness of the sea from him, and a bed where he 
could sleep. 
------ 
9 Iffish 
------ 
Ged spent three days in that village of the West Hand, recovering himself, and making ready a boat 
built not of spells and sea-wrack but of sound wood well pegged and caulked, with a stout mast and sail 

of her own, that he might sail easily and sleep when he needed. Like most boats of the North and the 
Reaches she was clinker-built, with planks overlapped and clenched one upon the other for strength in 
the high seas; every part of her was sturdy and well-made. Ged reinforced her wood with deep-inwoven 
charms, for he thought he might go far in that boat. She was built to carry two or three men, and the old 
man who owned her said that he and his brothers had been through high seas and foul weather with her 
and she had ridden all gallantly. 
Unlike the shrewd fisherman of Gont, this old man, for fear and wonder of his wizardry, would 
have given the boat to Ged. But Ged paid him for it in sorcerers' kind, healing his eyes of the cataracts 
that were in the way of blinding him. Then the old man, rejoicing, said to him, "We called the boat 
Sanderling, but do you call her Lookfar, and paint eyes aside her prow, and my thanks will look out of 
that blind wood for you and keep you from rock and reef. For I had forgotten how much light there is in 
the world, till you gave it back to me." 
Other works Ged also did in his days in that village under the steep forests of the Hand, as his 
power came back into him. These were such people as he had known as a boy in the Northward Vale of 
Gont, though poorer even than those. With them he was at home, as he would never be in the courts of 
the wealthy, and he knew their bitter wants without having to ask. So he laid charms of heal and ward on 
children who were lame or sickly, and spells of increase on the villagers' scrawny flocks of goats and 
sheep; he set the rune Simn on the spindles and looms, the boat's oars and tools of bronze and stone they 
brought him, that these might do their work well; and the rune Pirr he wrote on the rooftrees of the huts, 
which protects the house and its folk from fire, wind, and madness. 
When his boat Lookfar was ready and well stocked with water and dried fish, he stayed yet one 
more day in the village, to teach to their young chanter the Deed of Morred and the Havnorian Lay. Very 
seldom did any Archipelagan ship touch at the Hands: songs made a hundred years ago were news to 
those villagers, and they craved to hear of heroes. Had Ged been free of what was laid on him he would 
gladly have stayed there a week or a month to sing them what he knew, that the great songs might be 
known on a new isle. But he was not free, and the next morning he set sail, going straight south over the 
wide seas of the Reach. For southward the shadow bad gone. He need cast no finding-charm to know 
this: he knew it, as certainly as if a fine unreeling cord bound him and it together, no matter what miles 
and seas and lands might lie between. So he went certain, unhurried, and unhopeful on the way he must 
go, and the wind of winter bore him to the south. 
He sailed a day and a night over the lonesome sea, and on the second day he came to a small isle, 
which they told him was called Vemish. The people in the little port looked at him askance, and soon 
their sorcerer came hurrying. He looked hard at Ged, and then he bowed, and said in a voice that was 
both pompous and wheedling, "Lord Wizard! forgive my temerity, and honor us by accepting of us 
anything you may need for your voyage - food, drink, sailcloth, rope, my daughter is fetching to your 
boat at this moment a brace of fresh-roasted hens- I think it prudent, however, that you continue on your 
way from here as soon as it meets your convenience to do so. The people are in some dismay. For not 
long ago, the day before yesterday, a person was seen crossing our humble isle afoot from north to 
south, and no boat was seen to come with him aboard it nor no boat was seen to leave with him aboard 
it, and it did not seem that he cast any shadow. Those who saw this person tell me that he bore some 
likeness to yourself." 
At that, Ged bowed his own head, and turned and went back to the docks of Vemish and sailed out, 
not looking back. There was no profit in frightening the islanders or making an enemy of their sorcerer. 

He would rather sleep at sea again, and think over this news the sorcerer had told him, for he was sorely 
puzzled by it. 
The day ended, and the night passed with cold rain whispering over the sea all through the dark 
hours, and a grey dawn. Still the mild north wind carried Lookfar on. After noon the rain and mist blew 
off, and the sun shone from time to time; and late in the day Ged saw right athwart his course the low 
blue hills of a great island, brightened by that drifting winter sunlight. The smoke of hearthfires lingered 
blue over the slate roofs of little towns among those hills, a pleasant sight in the vast sameness of the sea. 
Ged followed a fishing-fleet in to their port, and going up the streets of the town in the golden 
winter evening he found an inn called The Harrekki, where firelight and ale and roast ribs of mutton 
warmed him body and soul. At the tables of the inn there were a couple of other voyagers, traders of the 
East Reach, but most of the men were townsfolk come there for good ale, news, and conversation. They 
were not rough timid people like the fisher-folk of the Hands, but true townsmen, alert and sedate. 
Surely they knew Ged for a wizard, but nothing at all was said of it, except that the innkeeper in talking 
(and he was a talkative man) mentioned that this town, Ismay, was fortunate in sharing with other towns 
of the island the inestimable treasure of an accomplished wizard trained at the School on Roke, who had 
been given his staff by the Archmage himself, and who, though out of town at the moment, dwelt in his 
ancestral home right in Ismay itself, which, therefore, stood in no need of any other practitioner of the 
High Arts. "As they say, two staffs in one town must come to blows, isn't it so, Sir?" said the innkeeper, 
smiling and full of cheer. So Ged was informed that as journey-man-wizard, one seeking a livelihood 
from sorcery, he was not wanted here. Thus he had got a blunt dismissal from Vemish and a bland one 
from Ismay, and he wondered at what he had been told about the kindly ways of the East Reach. This 
isle was Iffish, where his friend Vetch had been born. It did not seem so hospitable a place as Vetch had 
said. 
And yet he saw that they were, indeed, kindly faces enough. It was only that they sensed what he 
knew to be true: that he was set apart from them, cut off from them, that he bore a doom upon him and 
followed after a dark thing. He was like a cold wind blowing through the firelit room, like a black bird 
carried by on a storm from foreign lands. The sooner he went on, taking his evil destiny with him, the 
better for these folk. 
"I am on quest," he said to the innkeeper. "I will be here only a night or two." His tone was bleak. 
The Innkeeper, with a glance at the great yew-staff in the corner, said nothing at all for once, but filled 
up Ged's cup with brown ale till the foam ran over the top. 
Ged knew that he should spend only the one night in Ismay. There was no welcome for him there, 
or anywhere. He must go where he was bound. But he was sick of the cold empty sea and the silence 
where no voice spoke to him. He told himself he would spend one day in Ismay, and on the morrow go. 
So he slept late; when he woke a light snow was falling, and he idled about the lanes and byways of the 
town to watch the people busy at their doings. He watched children bundled in fur capes playing at snowcastle 
and building snowmen; he heard gossips chatting across the street from open doors, and watched 
the bronze-smith at work with a little lad red-faced and sweating to pump the long bellows-sleeves at the 
smelting pit; through windows lit with a dim ruddy gold from within as the short day darkened he saw 
women at their looms, turning a moment to speak or smile to child or husband there in the warmth 
within the house. Ged saw all these things from outside and apart, alone, and his heart was very heavy in 
him, though he would not admit to himself that he was sad. As night fell he still lingered in the streets, 
reluctant to go back to the inn. He heard a man and a girl talking together merrily as they came down the 

street past him towards the town square, and all at once he turned, for he knew the man's voice. 
He followed and caught up with the pair, coming up beside them in the late twilight lit only by 
distant lantern-gleams. The girl stepped back, but the man stared at him and then flung up the staff he 
carried, holding it between them as a barrier to ward off the threat or act of evil. And that was somewhat 
more than Ged could bear. His voice shook a little as he said, "I thought you would know me, Vetch." 
Even then Vetch hesitated for a moment. 
"I do know you," he said, and lowered the staff and took Ged's hand and hugged him round the 
shoulders-" I do know you! Welcome, my friend, welcome! What a sorry greeting I gave you, as if you 
were a ghost coming up from behind- and I have waited for you to come, and looked for you-" 
"So you are the wizard they boast of in Ismay? I wondered-" 
"Oh, yes, I'm their wizard; but listen, let me tell you why I didn't know you, lad. Maybe I've looked 
too hard for you. Three days ago- were you here three days ago, on Iffish?" 
"I came yesterday." 
"Three days ago, in the street in Quor, the village up there in the hills, I saw you. That is, I saw a 
presentment of you, or an imitation of you, or maybe simply a man who looks like you. He was ahead of 
me, going out of town, and he turned a bend in the road even as I saw him. I called and got no answer, I 
followed and found no one; nor any tracks; but the ground was frozen. It was a queer thing, and now 
seeing you come up out of the shadows like that I thought I was tricked again. I am sorry, Ged." He 
spoke Ged's true name softly, so that the girl who stood waiting a little way behind him would not hear it. 
Ged also spoke low, to use his friend's true name: "No matter, Estarriol. But this is myself, and I am 
glad to see you ...." 
Vetch heard, perhaps, something more than simple gladness in his voice. He had not yet let go of 
Ged's shoulder, and he said now, in the True Speech, "In trouble and from darkness you come, Ged, yet 
your coming is joy to me." Then he went on in his Reach-accented Hardic, "Come on, come home with 
us, we're going home, it's time to get in out of the dark! -This is my sister, the youngest of us, prettier 
than I am as you see, but much less clever: Yarrow she's called. Yarrow, this is the Sparrowhawk, the 
best of us and my friend." 
"Lord Wizard," the girl greeted him, and decorously she bobbed her head and hid her eyes with her 
hands to show respect, as women did in the East Reach; her eyes when not hidden were clear, shy, and 
curious. She was perhaps fourteen years old, dark like her brother, but very slight and slender. On her 
sleeve there clung, winged and taloned, a dragon no longer than her hand. 
They set off down the dusky street together, and Ged remarked as they went along, "In Gont they 
say Gontish women are brave, but I never saw a maiden there wear a dragon for a bracelet" 
This made Yarrow laugh, and she answered him straight, "This is only a harrekki, have you no 
harrekki on Gont?" Then she got shy for a moment and hid her eyes. 
"No, nor no dragons. Is not the creature a dragon?" 
"A little one, that lives in oak trees, and eats wasps and worms and sparrows' eggs -it grows no 
greater than this. Oh, Sir, my brother has told me often of the pet you had, the wild thing, the otak- do 
you have it still?" 
"No. No longer." 
Vetch turned to him as if with a question, but he held his tongue and asked nothing till much later, 
when the two of them sat alone over the stone firepit of Vetch's house. 
Though he was the chief wizard in the whole island of Iffish, Vetch made his home in Ismay, this 

small town where he had been born, living with his youngest brother and sister. His father had been a 
sea-trader of some means, and the house was spacious and strong-beamed, with much homely wealth of 
pottery and fine weaving and vessels of bronze and brass on carven shelves and chests. A great Taonian 
harp stood in one corner of the main room, and Yarrow's tapestry-loom in another, its tall frame inlaid 
with ivory. There Vetch for all his plain quiet ways was both a powerful wizard and a lord in his own 
house. There were a couple of old servants, prospering along with the house, and the brother, a cheerful 
lad, and Yarrow, quick and silent as a little fish, who served the two friends their supper and ate with 
them, listening to their talk, and afterwards slipped off to her own room. All things here were wellfounded, 
peaceful, and assured; and Ged looking about him at the firelit room said, "This is how a man 
should live," and sighed. 
"Well, it's one good way," said Vetch. "There are others. Now, lad, tell me if you can what things 
have come to you and gone from you since we last spoke, two years ago. And tell me what journey you 
are on, since I see well that you won't stay long with us this time." 
Ged told him, and when he was done Vetch sat pondering for a long while. Then he said, "I'll go 
with you, Ged." 
"No." 
"I think I will." 
"No, Estarriol. This is no task or bane of yours. I began this evil course alone, I will finish it alone, 
I do not want any other to suffer from it - you least of all, you who tried to keep my hand from the evil 
act in the very beginning, Estarriol-" 
"Pride was ever your mind's master," his friend said smiling, as if they talked of a matter of small 
concern to either. "Now think: it is your quest, assuredly, but if the quest fail, should there not be 
another there who might bear warning to the Archipelago? For the shadow would be a fearful power 
then. And if you defeat the thing, should there not be another there who will tell of it in the Archipelago, 
that the Deed may be known and sung? I know I can be of no use to you; yet I think I should go with 
you." 
So entreated Ged could not deny his friend, but he said, "I should not have stayed this day here. I 
knew it, but I stayed." 
"Wizards do not meet by chance, lad," said Vetch. "And after all, as you said yourself, I was with 
you at the beginning of your journey. It is right that I should follow you to its end." He put new wood on 
the fire, and they sat gazing into the flames a while. 
"There is one I have not heard of since that night on Roke Knoll, and I had no heart to ask any at 
the School of him: Jasper I mean." 
"He never won his staff. He left Roke that same summer, and went to the Island of O to be sorcerer 
in the Lord's household at O-tokne. I know no more of him than that." 
Again they were silent, watching the fire and enjoying (since it was a bitter night) the warmth on 
their legs and faces as they sat on the broad coping of the firepit, their feet almost among the coals. 
Ged said at last, speaking low, "There is a thing that I fear, Estarriol. I fear it more if you are with 
me when I go. There in the Hands in the dead end of the inlet I turned upon the shadow, it was within 
my hands' reach, and I seized it - I tried to seize it. And there was nothing I could hold. I could not 
defeat it. It fled, I followed. But that may happen again, and yet again. I have no power over the thing. 
There may be neither death nor triumph to end this quest; nothing to sing of; no end. It may be I must 
spend my life running from sea to sea and land to land on an endless vain venture, a shadow-quest." 

 "Avert!" said Vetch, turning his left hand in the gesture that turns aside the ill chance spoken of. 
For all his somber thoughts this made Ged grin a little, for it is rather a child's charm than a wizard's; 
there was always such village innocence in Vetch. Yet also he was keen, shrewd, direct to the center of a 
thing. He said now, "That is a grim thought and I trust a false one. I guess rather that what I saw begin, I 
may see end. Somehow you will learn its nature, its being, what it is, and so hold and bind and vanquish 
it. Though that is a hard question: what is it... There is a thing that worries me, I do not understand it. It 
seems the shadow now goes in your shape, or a kind of likeness of you at least, as they saw it on Vemish 
and as I saw it here in Iffish. How may that be, and why, and why did it never do so in the Archipelago?" 
"They say, Rules change in the Reaches." 
"Aye, a true saying, I can tell you. There are good spells I learned on Roke that have no power here, 
or go all awry; and also there are spells worked here I never learned on Roke. Every land has its own 
powers, and the farther one goes from the Inner Lands, the less one can guess about those powers and 
their governance. But I do not think it is only that which works this change in the shadow." 
"Nor do I. I think that, when I ceased to flee from it and turned against it, that turning of my will 
upon it gave it shape and form, even though the same act prevented it from taking my strength from me. 
All my acts have their echo in it; it is my creature." 
"In Osskil it named you, and so stopped any wizardry you might have used against it. Why did it 
not do so again, there in the Hands?" 
"I do not know. Perhaps it is only from my weakness that it draws the strength to speak. Almost 
with my own tongue it speaks: for how did it know my name? How did it know my name? I have racked 
my brains on that over all the seas since I left Gont, and I cannot see the answer. Maybe it cannot speak 
at all in its own form or formlessness, but only with borrowed tongue, as a gebbeth. I do not know." 
"Then you must beware meeting it in gebbeth-form a second time." 
"I think," Ged replied, stretching out his hands to the red coals as if he felt an inward chill, "I think 
I will not. It is bound to me now as I am to it. It cannot get so far free of me as to seize any other man 
and empty him of will and being, as it did Skiorh. It can possess me. If ever I weaken again, and try to 
escape from it, to break the bond, it will possess me. And yet, when I held it with all the strength I had, it 
became mere vapor, and escaped from me... And so it will again, and yet it cannot really escape, for I 
can always find it. I am bound to the foul cruel thing, and will be forever, unless I can learn the word 
that masters it: its name." 
Brooding his friend asked, "Are there names in the dark realms?" 
"Gensher the Archmage said there are not. My master Ogion said otherwise." 
"Infinite are the arguments of mages," Vetch quoted, with a smile that was somewhat grim. 
"She who served the Old Power on Osskil swore that the Stone would tell me the shadow's name, 
but that I count for little. However there was also a dragon, who offered to trade that name for his own, 
to be rid of me; and I have thought that, where mages argue, dragons may be wise." 
"Wise, but unkind. But what dragon is this? You did not tell me you had been talking with dragons 
since I saw you last" 
They talked together late that night, and though always they came back to the bitter matter of what 
lay before Ged, yet their pleasure in being together overrode all; for the love between them was strong 
and steadfast, unshaken by time or chance. In the morning Ged woke beneath his friend's roof, and while 
he was still drowsy he felt such well-being as if he were in some place wholly defended from evil and 
harm. All day long a little of this dream-peace clung to his thoughts, and he took it, not as a good omen, 

but as a gift. It seemed likely to him that leaving this house he would leave the last haven he was to 
know, and so while the short dream lasted he would be happy in it. 
Having affairs he must see to before he left Iffish, Vetch went off to other villages of the island 
with the lad who served him as prentice-sorcerer. Ged stayed with Yarrow and her brother, called Murre, 
who was between her and Vetch in age. He seemed not much more than a boy, for there was no gift or 
scourge of mage-power in him, and he had never been anywhere but Iffish, Tok, and Holp, and his life 
was easy and untroubled. Ged watched him with wonder and some envy, and exactly so he watched 
Ged: to each it seemed very queer that the other, so different, yet was his own age, nineteen years. Ged 
marvelled how one who had lived nineteen years could be so carefree. Admiring Murre's comely, 
cheerful face he felt himself to be all lank and harsh, never guessing that Murre envied him even the 
scars that scored his face, and thought them the track of a dragon's claws and the very rune and sign of a 
hero. 
The two young men were thus somewhat shy with each other, but as for Yarrow she soon lost her 
awe of Ged, being in her own house and mistress of it. He was very gentle with her, and many were the 
questions she asked of him, for Vetch, she said, would never tell her anything. She kept busy those two 
days making dry wheatcakes for the voyagers to carry, and wrapping up dried fish and meat and other 
such provender to stock their boat, until Ged told her to stop, for he did not plan to sail clear to Selidor 
without a halt. 
"Where is Selidor?" 
"Very far out in the Western Reach, where dragons are as common as mice." 
"Best stay in the East then, our dragons are as small as mice. There's your meat, then; you're sure 
that's enough? Listen, I don't understand: you and my brother both are mighty wizards, you wave your 
hand and mutter and the thing is done. Why do you get hungry, then? When it comes suppertime at sea, 
why not say, Meat-pie! and the meat-pie appears, and you eat it?" 
"Well, we could do so. But we don't much wish to eat our words, as they say. Meat-pie! is only a 
word, after all... We can make it odorous, and savorous, and even filling, but it remains a word. It fools 
the stomach and gives no strength to the hungry man." 
"Wizards, then, are not cooks," said Murre, who was sitting across the kitchen hearth from Ged, 
carving a box-lid of fine wood; he was a woodworker by trade, though not a very zealous one. 
"Nor are cooks wizards, alas," said Yarrow on her knees to see if the last batch of cakes baking on 
the hearthbricks was getting brown. "But I still don't understand, Sparrowhawk. I have seen my brother, 
and even his prentice, make light in a dark place only by saying one word: and the light shines, it is 
bright, not a word but a light you can see your way by!" 
"Aye," Ged answered. "Light is a power. A great power, by which we exist, but which exists 
beyond our needs, in itself. Sunlight and starlight are time, and time is light. In the sunlight, in the days 
and years, life is. In a dark place life may call upon the light, naming it. But usually when you see a 
wizard name or call upon some thing, some object to appear, that is not the same, he calls upon no 
power greater than himself, and what appears is an illusion only. To summon a thing that is not there at 
all, to call it by speaking its true name, that is a great mastery, not lightly used. Not for mere hunger's 
sake. Yarrow, your little dragon has stolen a cake." 
Yarrow had listened so hard, gazing at Ged as he spoke, that she had not seen the harrekki scuttle 
down from its warm perch on the kettle-hook over the hearth and seize a wheatcake bigger than itself. 
She took the small scaly creature on her knee and fed it bits and crumbs, while she pondered what Ged 

had told her. 
"So then you would not summon up a real meat-pie lest you disturb what my brother is always 
talking about- I forget its name-" 
"Equilibrium," Ged replied soberly, for she was very serious. 
"Yes. But, when you were shipwrecked, you sailed from the place in a boat woven mostly of spells, 
and it didn't leak water. Was it illusion?" 
"Well, partly it was illusion, because I am uneasy seeing the sea through great holes in my boat, so 
I patched them for the looks of the thing. But the strength of the boat was not illusion, nor summoning, 
but made with another kind of art, a binding-spell. The wood was bound as one whole, one entire thing, 
a boat. What is a boat but a thing that doesn't leak water?" 
"I've bailed some that do," said Murre. 
"Well, mine leaked, too, unless I was constantly seeing to the spell." He bent down from his corner 
seat and took a cake from the bricks, and juggled it in his hands. "I too have stolen a cake." 
"You have burned fingers, then. And when you're starving on the waste water between the far isles 
you'll think of that cake and say, Ah! had I not stolen that cake I might eat it now, alas!- I shall eat my 
brother's, so he can starve with you 
"Thus is Equilibrium maintained," Ged remarked, while she took and munched a hot, half-toasted 
cake; and this made her giggle and choke. But presently looking serious again she said, "I wish I could 
truly understand what you tell me. I am too stupid." 
"Little sister," Ged said, "it is I that have no skill explaining. If we had more time-" 
"We will have more time," Yarrow said. "When my brother comes back home, you will come with 
him, for a while at least, won't you?" 
"If I can," he answered gently. 
There was a little pause; and Yarrow asked, watching the harrekki climb back to its perch, "Tell me 
just this, if it is not a secret: what other great powers are there beside the light?" 
"It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, 
water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise 
together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all 
are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other 
power. No other name." 
Staying his knife on the carved wood, Murre asked, "What of death?" 
The girl listened, her shining black head bent down. 
"For a word to be spoken," Ged answered slowly, "there must be silence. Before, and after." Then 
all at once he got up, saying, "I have no right to speak of these things. The word that was mine to say I 
said wrong. It is better that I keep still; I will not speak again. Maybe there is no true power but the 
dark." And he left the fireside and the warm kitchen, taking up his cloak and going out alone into the 
drizzling cold rain of winter in the streets. 
"He is under a curse," Murre said, gazing somewhat fearfully after him. 
"I think this voyage he is on leads him to his death," the girl said, "and he fears that, yet he goes 
on." She lifted her head as if she watched, through the red flame of the fire, the course of a boat that 
came through the seas of winter alone, and went on out into empty seas. Then her eyes filled with tears a 
moment, but she said nothing. 

 Vetch came home the next day, and took his leave of the notables of Ismay, who were most 
unwilling to let him go off to sea in midwinter on a mortal quest not even his own; but though they 
might reproach him, there was nothing at all they could do to stop him. Growing weary of old men who 
nagged him, he said, "I am yours, by parentage and custom and by duty undertaken towards you. I am 
your wizard. But it, is time you recalled that, though I am a servant, I am not your servant. When I am 
free to come back I will come back: till then farewell." 
At daybreak, as grey light welled up in the east from the sea, the two young men set forth in 
Lookfar from the harbor of Ismay, raising a brown, strong-woven sail to the north wind. On the dock 
Yarrow stood and watched them go, as sailor's wives and sisters stand on all the shores of all Earthsea 
watching their men go out on the sea, and they do not wave or call aloud, but stand still in hooded cloak 
of grey or brown, there on the shore that dwindles smaller and smaller from the boat while the water 
grows wide between. 
------ 
10 The Open Sea 
------ 
The haven now was sunk from sight and Lookfar's painted eyes, wave-drenched, looked ahead on 
seas ever wider and more desolate. In two days and nights the companions made the crossing from Iffish 
to Soders Island, a hundred miles of foul weather and contrary winds. They stayed in port there only 
briefly, long enough to refill a waterskin, and to buy a tarsmeared sailcloth to protect some of their gear 
in the undecked boat from seawater and rain. They had not provided this earlier, because ordinarily a 
wizard looks after such small conveniences by way of spells, the very least and commonest kind of 
spells, and indeed it takes little more magic to freshen seawater and so save the bother of carrying fresh 
water. But Ged seemed most unwilling to use his craft, or to let Vetch use his. He said only, "It's better 
not," and his friend did not ask or argue. For as the wind first filled their sail, both had felt a heavy 
foreboding, cold as that winter wind. Haven, harbor, peace, safety, all that was behind. They had turned 
away. They went now a way in which all events were perilous, and no acts were meaningless. On the 
course on which they were embarked, the saying of the least spell might change chance and move the 
balance of power and of doom: for they went now toward the very center of that balance, toward the 
place where light and darkness meet. Those who travel thus say no word carelessly. 
Sailing out again and coasting round the shores of Soders, where white snowfields faded up into 
foggy hills, Ged took the boat southward again, and now they entered waters where the great traders of 
the Archipelago never come, the outmost fringes of the Reach. 
Vetch asked no question about their course, knowing that Ged did not choose it but went as he must 
go. As Soders Island grew small and pale behind them, and the waves hissed and smacked under the 
prow, and the great grey plain of water circled them all round clear to the edge of the sky, Ged asked, 
"What lands lie ahead this course?" 
"Due south of Soders there are no lands at all. Southeast you go a long way and find little: Pelimer, 
Kornay, Gosk, and Astowell which is also called Lastland. Beyond it, the Open Sea." 
"What to the southwest?" 
"Rolameny, which is one of our East Reach isles, and some small islets round about it; then nothing 

till you enter the South Reach: Rood, and Toom, and the Isle of the Ear where men do not go." 
"We may," Ged said wryly. 
"I'd rather not," said Vetch- "that is a disagreeable part of the world, they say, full of bones and 
portents. Sailors say that there are stars to be seen from the waters by the Isle of the Ear and Far Sorr that 
cannot be seen anywhere else, and that have never been named." 
"Aye, there was a sailor on the ship that brought me first to Roke who spoke of that. And he told 
tales of the RaftFolk in the far South Reach, who never come to land but once a year, to cut the great 
logs for their rafts, and the rest of the year, all the days and months, they drift on the currents of ocean, 
out of sight of any land. I'd like to see those raft-villages " 
"I would not," said Vetch grinning. "Give me land, and land-folk; the sea in its bed and I in mine..." 
"I wish I could have seen all the cities of the Archipelago," Ged said as he held the sail-rope, 
watching the wide grey wastes before them. "Havnor at the world's heart, and Ea where the myths were 
born, and Shelleth of the Fountains on Way; all the cities and the great lands. And the small lands, the 
strange lands of the Outer Reaches, them too. To sail right down the Dragons' Run, away in the west. Or 
to sail north into the ice-floes, clear to Hogen Land. Some say that is a land greater than all the 
Archipelago, and others say it is mere reefs and rocks with ice between. No one knows. I should like to 
see the whales in the northern seas.... But I cannot. I must go where I am bound to go, and turn my back 
on the bright shores. I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the 
cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark." So, as the mageborn will, 
Ged made his fear and regret into a song, a brief lament, halfsung, that was not for himself alone; and his 
friend replying spoke the hero's words from the Deed of Erreth-Akbe, "O may I see the earth's bright 
hearth once more, the white towers of Havnor..." 
So they sailed on their narrow course over the wide forsaken waters. The most they saw that day 
was a school of silver pannies swimming south, but never a dolphin leapt nor did the flight of gull or 
murre or tern break the grey air. As the east darkened and the west grew red, Vetch brought out food and 
divided it between them and said, "Here's the last of the ale. I drink to the one who thought to put the 
keg aboard for thirsty men in cold weather: my sister Yarrow." 
At that Ged left off his bleak thoughts and his gazing ahead over the sea, and he saluted Yarrow 
more earnestly, perhaps, than Vetch. The thought of her brought to his mind the sense of her wise and 
childish sweetness. She was not like any person he had known. (What young girl had he ever known at 
all? but he never thought of that.) "She is like a little fish, a minnow, that swims in a clear creek," he 
said, "-defenseless, yet you cannot catch her." 
At this Vetch looked straight at him, smiling. "You are a mage born," he said. "Her true name is 
Kest" In the Old Speech, kest is minnow, as Ged well knew; and this pleased him to the heart. But after 
a while he said in a low voice, "You should not have told me her name, maybe." 
But Vetch, who bad not done so lightly, said, "Her name is safe with you as mine is. And, besides, 
you knew it without my telling you..." 
Red sank to ashes in the west, and ash-grey sank to black. All the sea and sky were wholly dark. 
Ged stretched out in the bottom of the boat to sleep, wrapped in his cloak of wool and fur. Vetch, 
holding the sail-rope, sang softly from the Deed of Enlad, where the song tells how the mage Morred the 
White left Havnor in his oarless longship, and coming to the island Solea saw Elfarran in the orchards in 
the spring. Ged slept before the song came to the sorry end of their love, Morred's death, the ruin of 
Enlad, the seawaves, vast and bitter, whelming the orchards of Solea. Towards midnight he woke, and 

watched again while Vetch slept. The little boat ran sharp over choppy seas, fleeing the strong wind that 
leaned on her sail, running blind through the night. But the overcast had broken, and before dawn the 
thin moon shining between brown-edged clouds shed a weak light on the sea. 
"The moon wanes to her dark," Vetch murmured, awake in the dawn, when for a while the cold 
wind dropped. Ged looked up at the white half-ring above the paling eastern waters, but said nothing. 
The dark of the moon that follows first after Sunreturn is called the Fallows, and is the contrary pole of 
the days of the Moon and the Long Dance in summer. It is an unlucky time for travellers and for the 
sick; children are not given their true name during the Fallows, and no Deeds are sung, nor swords nor 
edge-tools sharpened, nor oaths sworn. It is the dark axis of the year, when things done are ill done. 
Three days out from Soders they came, following seabirds and shore-wrack, to Pelimer, a small isle 
humped high above the high grey seas. Its people spoke Hardic, but in their own fashion, strange even to 
Vetch's ears. The young men came ashore there for fresh water and a respite from the sea, and at first 
were well received, with wonder and commotion. There was a sorcerer in the main town of the island, 
but he was mad. He would talk only of the great serpent that was eating at the foundations of Pelimer so 
that soon the island must go adrift like a boat cut from her moorings, and slide out over the edge of the 
world. At first he greeted the young wizards courteously, but as he talked about the serpent he began to 
look askance at Ged: and then he fell to railing at them there in the street, calling them spies and servants 
of the Sea-Snake. The Pelimerians looked dourly at them after that, since though mad he was their 
sorcerer. So Ged and Vetch made no long stay, but set forth again before nightfall, going always south 
and east. 
In these days and nights of sailing Ged never spoke of the shadow, nor directly of his quest; and the 
nearest Vetch came to asking any question was (as they followed the same course farther and farther out 
and away from the known lands of Earthsea ) -Are you sure?-" To this Ged answered only, "Is the iron 
sure where the magnet lies?" Vetch nodded and they went on, no more being said by either. But from 
time to time they talked of the crafts and devices that mages of old days had used to find out the hidden 
name of baneful powers and beings: how Nereger of Paln had learned the Black Mage's name from 
overhearing the conversation of dragons, and how Morred had seen his enemy's name written by falling 
raindrops in the dust of the battlefield of the Plains of Enlad. They spoke of finding-spells, and 
invocations, and those Answerable Questions which only the Master Patterner of Roke can ask. But 
often Ged would end by murmuring words which Ogion had said to him on the shoulder of Gont 
Mountain in an autumn long ago: "To hear, one must be silent..." And he would fall silent, and ponder, 
hour by hour, always watching the sea ahead of the boat's way. Sometimes it seemed to Vetch that his 
friend saw, across the waves and miles and grey days yet to, come, the thing they followed and the dark 
end of their voyage. 
They passed between Komay and Gosk in foul weather, seeing neither isle in the fog and rain, and 
knowing they had passed them only on the next day when they saw ahead of them an isle of pinnacled 
cliffs above which sea-gulls wheeled in huge flocks whose mewing clamor could be heard from far over 
the sea. Vetch said, 'That will be Astowell, from the look of it. Lastland. East and south of it the charts 
are empty." 
"Yet they who live there may know of farther lands," Ged answered. 
"Why do you say so?" Vetch asked, for Ged had spoken uneasily; and his answer to this again was 
halting and strange. "Not there," he said, gazing at Astowell ahead, and past it, or through it "Not there. 
Not on the sea. Not on the sea but on dry land: what land? Before the springs of the open sea, beyond the 

sources, behind the gates of daylight-" 
Then he fell silent, and when he spoke again it was in an ordinary voice, as if he had been freed 
from a spell or a vision, and had no clear memory of it. 
The port of Astowell, a creek-mouth between rocky heights, was on the northern shore of the isle, 
and all the huts of the town faced north and west; it was as if the island turned its face, though from so 
far away, always towards Earthsea, towards mankind. 
Excitement and dismay attended the arrival of strangers, in a season when no boat had ever braved 
the seas round Astowell. The women all stayed in the wattle huts, peering out the door, hiding their 
children behind their skirts, drawing back fearfully into the darkness of the huts as the strangers came up 
from the beach. The men, lean fellows ill-clothed against the cold, gathered in a solemn circle about 
Vetch and Ged, and each one held a stone handaxe or a knife of shell. But once their fear was past they 
made the strangers very welcome, and there was no end to their questions. Seldom did any ship come to 
them even from Soders or Rolameny, they having nothing to trade for bronze or fine wares; they had not 
even any wood. Their boats were coracles woven of reed, and it was a brave sailor who would go as far 
as Gosk or Kornay in such a craft. They dwelt all alone here at the edge of all the maps. They had no 
witch or sorcerer, and seemed not to recognise the young wizards' staffs for what they were, admiring 
them only for the precious stuff they were made of, wood. Their chief or Isle-Man was very old, and he 
alone of his people had ever before seen a man born in the Archipelago. Ged, therefore, was a marvel to 
them; the men brought their little sons to look at the Archipelagan, so they might remember him when 
they were old. They had never heard of Gont, only of Havnor and Ea, and took him for a Lord of 
Havnor. He did his best to answer their questions about the white city he had never seen. But he was 
restless as the evening wore on, and at last he asked the men of the village, as they sat crowded round 
the firepit in the lodgehouse in the reeking warmth of the goatdung and broom-faggots that were all their 
fuel, "What lies eastward of your land?" 
They were silent, some grinning others grim. 
The old Isle-Man answered, "The sea." 
"There is no land beyond?" 
"This is Lastland. There is no land beyond. There is nothing but water till world's edge." 
"These are wise men, father," said a younger man, "seafarers, voyagers. Maybe they know of a land 
we do not know of." 
"There is no land east of this land," said the old man, and he looked long at Ged, and spoke no more 
to him. 
The companions slept that night in the smoky warmth of the lodge. Before daylight Ged roused his 
friend, whispering, "Estarriol, wake. We cannot stay, we must go." 
"Why so soon?" Vetch asked, full of sleep. 
"Not soon- late. I have followed too slow. It has found the way to escape me, and so doom me. It 
must not escape me, for I must follow it however far it goes. If I lose it I am lost" 
"Where do we follow it?" 
"Eastward. Come. I filled the waterskins." 
So they left the lodge before any in the village was awake, except a baby that cried a little in the 
darkness of some but, and fell still again. By the vague starlight they found the way down to the 
creekmouth, and untied Lookfar from the rock cairn where she had been made fast, and pushed her out 
into the black water. So they set out eastward from Astowell into the Open Sea, on the first day of the 

Fallows, before sunrise. 
That day they had clear skies. The world's wind was cold and gusty from the northeast, but Ged had 
raised the magewind: the first act of magery he had done since he left the Isle of the Hands. They sailed 
very fast due eastward. The boat shuddered with the great, smoking, sunlit waves that hit her as she ran, 
but she went gallantly as her builder had promised, answering the magewind as true as any 
spellenwoven ship of Roke. 
Ged spoke not at all that morning, except to renew the power of the wind-spell or to keep a 
charmed strength in the sail, and Vetch finished his sleep, though uneasily, in the stern of the boat. At 
noon they ate. Ged doled their food out sparingly, and the portent of this was plain, but both of them 
chewed their bit of salt fish and wheaten cake, and neither said anything. 
All afternoon they cleaved eastward never turning nor slackening pace. Once Ged broke his silence, 
saying, "Do you hold with those who think the world is all landless sea beyond the Outer Reaches, or 
with those who imagine other Archipelagoes or vast undiscovered lands on the other face of the world?" 
"At this time," said Vetch, "I hold with those who think the world has but one face, and he who 
sails too far will fall off the edge of it" 
Ged did not smile; there was no mirth left in him. "Who knows what a man might meet, out there? 
Not we, who keep always to our coasts and shores." 
"Some have sought to know, and have not returned. And no ship has ever come to us from lands we 
do not know." 
Ged made no reply. 
All that day, all that night they went driven by the powerful wind of magery over the great swells of 
ocean, eastward. Ged kept watch from dusk till dawn, for in darkness the force that drew or drove him 
grew stronger yet. Always he watched ahead, though his eyes in the moonless night could see no more 
than the painted eyes aside the boat's blind prow. By daybreak his dark face was grey with weariness, 
and he was so cramped with cold that he could hardly stretch out to rest. He said whispering, "Hold the 
magewind from the west, Estarriol," and then he slept. 
There was no sunrise, and presently rain came beating across the bow from the northeast. It was no 
storm, only the long, cold winds and rains of winter. Soon all things in the open boat were wet through, 
despite the sailcloth cover they had bought; and Vetch felt as if he too were soaked clear to the bone; 
and Ged shivered in his sleep. In pity for his friend, and perhaps for himself, Vetch tried to turn aside for 
a little that rude ceaseless wind that bore the rain. But though, following Ged's will, he could keep the 
magewind strong and steady, his weatherworking had small power here so far from land, and the wind 
of the Open Sea did not listen to his voice. 
And at this a certain fear came into Vetch, as he began to wonder how much wizardly power would 
be left to him and Ged, if they went on and on away from the lands where men were meant to live. 
Ged watched again that night, and all night held the boat eastward. When day came the world's 
wind slackened somewhat, and the sun shone fitfully; but the great swells ran so high that Lookfar must 
tilt and climb up them as if they were hills, and hang at the hillcrest and plunge suddenly, and climb up 
the next again, and the next, and the next, unending. 
In the evening of that day Vetch spoke out of long silence. "My friend," he said, "you spoke once as 
if sure we would come to land at last. I would not question your vision but for this, that it might be a 
trick, a deception made by that which you follow, to lure you on farther than a man can go over ocean. 
For our power may change and weaken on strange seas. And a shadow does not tire, or starve, or drown." 

 They sat side by side on the thwart, yet Ged looked at him now as if from a distance, across a wide 
abyss. His eyes were troubled, and he was slow to answer. 
At last he said, "Estarriol, we are coming near." 
Hearing his words, his friend knew them to be true. He was afraid, then. But he put his hand on 
Ged's shoulder and said only, "Well, then, good; that is good." 
Again that night Ged watched, for he could not sleep in the dark. Nor would he sleep when the third 
day came. Still they ran with that ceaseless, light, terrible swiftness over the sea, and Vetch wondered at 
Ged's power that could hold so strong a magewind hour after hour, here on the Open Sea where Vetch 
felt his own power all weakened and astray. And they went on, until it seemed to Vetch that what Ged 
had spoken would come true, and they were going beyond the sources of the sea and eastward behind 
the gates of daylight. Ged stayed forward in the boat, looking ahead as always. But he was not watching 
the ocean now, or not the ocean that Vetch saw, a waste of heaving water to the rim of the sky. In Ged's 
eyes there was a dark vision that overlapped and veiled the grey sea and the grey sky, and the darkness 
grew, and the veil thickened. None of this was visible to Vetch, except when he looked at his friend's 
face; then he too saw the darkness for a moment. They went on, and on. And it was as if, though one 
wind drove them in one boat, Vetch went east over the world's sea, while Ged went alone into a realm 
where there was no east or west, no rising or setting of the sun, or of the stars. 
Ged stood up suddenly in the prow, and spoke aloud. The magewind dropped. Lookfar lost 
headway, and rose and fell on the vast surges like a chip of wood. Though the world's wind blew strong 
as ever straight from the north now, the brown sail hung slack, unstirred. And so the boat hung on the 
waves, swung by their great slow swinging, but going no direction. 
Ged said, "Take down the sail," and Vetch did so quickly, while Ged unlashed the oars and set 
them in the locks and bent his back to rowing. 
Vetch, seeing only the waves heaving up and down clear to the end of sight could not understand 
why they went now by oars; but he waited, and presently he was aware that the world's wind was 
growing faint and the swells diminishing. The climb and plunge of the boat grew less and less, till at last 
she seemed to go forward under Ged's strong oarstrokes over water that lay almost still, as in a landlocked 
bay. And though Vetch could not see what Ged saw, when between his strokes he looked ever 
and again over his shoulder at what lay before the boat's way - though Vetch could not see the dark 
slopes beneath unmoving stars, yet he began to see with his wizard's eye a darkness that welled up in the 
hollows of the waves all around the boat, and he saw the billows grow low and sluggish as they were 
choked with sand. 
If this were an enchantment of illusion, it was powerful beyond belief; to make the Open Sea seem 
land. Trying to collect his wits and courage, Vetch spoke the Revelation-spell, watching between each 
slow-syllabled word for change or tremor of illusion in this strange drying and shallowing of the abyss 
of ocean. But there was none. Perhaps the spell, though it should affect only his own vision and not the 
magic at work about them, had no power here. Or perhaps there was no illusion, and they had come to 
world's end. 
Unheeding, Ged rowed always slower, looking over his shoulder, choosing a way among channels 
or shoals and shallows that he alone could see. The boat shuddered as her keel dragged. Under that keel 
lay the vast deeps of the sea, yet they were aground. Ged drew the oars up rattling in their locks, and that 
noise was terrible, for there was no other sound. All sounds of water, wind, wood, sail, were gone, lost 
in a huge profound silence that might have been unbroken forever. The boat lay motionless. No breath of 

wind moved. The sea had turned to sand, shadowy, unstirred. Nothing moved in the dark sky or on that 
dry unreal ground that went on and on into gathering darkness all around the boat as far as eye could see. 
Ged stood up, and took his staff, and lightly stepped over the side of the boat. Vetch thought to see 
him fall and sink down in the sea, the sea that surely was there behind this dry, dim veil that hid away 
water, sky, and light. But there was no sea any more. Ged walked away from the boat. The dark sand 
showed his footprints where he went, and whispered a little under his step. 
His staff began to shine, not with the werelight but with a clear white glow, that soon grew so 
bright that it reddened his fingers where they held the radiant wood. 
He strode forward, away from the boat, but in no direction. There were no directions here, no north 
or south or east or west, only towards and away. 
To Vetch, watching, the light he bore seemed like a great slow star that moved through the 
darkness. And the darkness about it thickened, blackened, drew together. This also Ged saw, watching 
always ahead through the light. And after a while he saw at the faint outermost edge of the light a 
shadow that came towards him over the sand. 
At first it was shapeless, but as it drew nearer it took on the look of a man. An old man it seemed, 
grey and grim, coming towards Ged; but even as Ged saw his father the smith in that figure, he saw that 
it was not an old man but a young one. It was Jasper: Jasper's insolent handsome young face, and silverclasped 
grey cloak, and stiff stride. Hateful was the look he fixed on Ged across the dark intervening air. 
Ged did not stop, but slowed his pace, and as he went forward he raised his staff up a little higher. It 
brightened, and in its light the look of Jasper fell from the figure that approached, and it became 
Pechvarry. But Pechvarry's face was all bloated and pallid like the face of a drowned man, and he 
reached out his hand strangely as if beckoning. Still Ged did not stop, but went forward, though there 
were only a few yards left between them now. Then the thing that faced him changed utterly, spreading 
out to either side as if it opened enormous thin wings, and it writhed, and swelled, and shrank again. Ged 
saw in it for an instant Skiorh's white face, and then a pair of clouded, staring eyes, and then suddenly a 
fearful face he did not know, man or monster, with writhing lips and eyes that were like pits going back 
into black emptiness. 
At that Ged lifted up the staff high, and the radiance of it brightened intolerably, burning with so 
white and great a light that it compelled and harrowed even that ancient darkness. In that light all form 
of man sloughed off the thing that came towards Ged. It drew together and shrank and blackened, 
crawling on four short taloned legs upon the sand. But still it came forward, lifting up to him a blind 
unformed snout without lips or ears or eyes. As they came right together it became utterly black in the 
white mage-radiance that burned about it, and it heaved itself upright. In silence, man and shadow met 
face to face, and stopped. 
Aloud and clearly, breaking that old silence, Ged spoke the shadow's name and in the same moment 
the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same word: "Ged." And the two voices were one 
voice. 
Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff, and took hold of his shadow, of the black self that 
reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one. 
But to Vetch, watching in terror through the dark twilight from far off over the sand, it seemed that 
Ged was overcome, for he saw the clear radiance fail and grow dim. Rage and despair filled him, and he 
sprang out on the sand to help his friend or die with him, and ran towards that small fading glimmer of 
light in the empty dusk of the dry land. But as he ran the sand sank under his feet, and he struggled in it 

as in quicksand, as through a heavy flow of water: until with a roar of noise and a glory of daylight, and 
the bitter cold of winter, and the bitter taste of salt, the world was restored to him and he floundered in 
the sudden, true, and living sea. 
Nearby the boat rocked on the grey waves, empty. Vetch could see nothing else on the water; the 
battering wavetops filled his eyes and blinded him. No strong swimmer, he struggled as best he could to 
the boat, and pulled himself up into her. Coughing and trying to wipe away the water that streamed from 
his hair, he looked about desperately, not knowing now which way to look. And at last he made out 
something dark among the waves, a long way off across what had been sand and now was wild water. 
Then he leapt to the oars and rowed mightily to his friend, and catching Ged's arms helped and hauled 
him up over the side. 
Ged was dazed and his eyes stared as if they saw nothing, but there was no hurt to be seen on him. 
His staff, black yew wood, all radiance quenched, was grasped in his right hand, and he would not let go 
of it. He said no word. Spent and soaked and shaking he lay huddled up against the mast, never looking 
at Vetch who raised the sail and turned the boat to catch the north-east wind. He saw nothing of the 
world until, straight ahead of their course, in the sky that darkened where the sun had set, between long 
clouds in a bay of clear blue light, the new moon shone: a ring of ivory, a rim of horn, reflected sunlight 
shining across the ocean of the dark. 
Ged lifted his face and gazed at that remote bright crescent in the west. 
He gazed for a long time, and then he stood up erect, holding his staff in his two hands as a warrior 
holds his long sword. He looked about at the sky, the sea, the brown swelling sail above him, his friend's 
face. 
"Estarriol," he said, "look, it is done. It is over." He laughed. "The wound is healed," he said, "I am 
whole, I am free." Then he bent over and hid his face in his arms, weeping like a boy. 
Until that moment Vetch had watched him with an anxious dread, for he was not sure what had 
happened there in the dark land. He did not know if this was Ged in the boat with him, and his hand had 
been for hours ready to the anchor, to stave in the boat's planking and sink her there in midsea, rather 
than carry back to the harbors of Earthsea the evil thing that he feared might have taken Ged's look and 
form. Now when he saw his friend and heard him speak, his doubt vanished. And he began to see the 
truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had 
made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any 
power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, 
or pain, or hatred, or the dark. In the Creation of Ea, which is the oldest song, it is said, "Only in silence 
the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky." That song 
Vetch sang aloud now as he held the boat westward, going before the cold wind of the winter night that 
blew at their backs from the vastness of the Open Sea. 
Eight days they sailed and eight again, before they came in sight of land. Many times they had to 
refill their waterskin with spell-sweetened water of the sea; and they fished, but even when they called 
out fisherman's charms they caught very little, for the fish of the Open Sea do not know their own names 
and pay no heed to magic. When they had nothing left to eat but a few scraps of smoked meat Ged 
remembered what Yarrow had said when he stole the cake from the hearth, that he would regret his theft 
when he came to hunger on the sea; but hungry as he was the remembrance pleased him. For she had 
also said that he, with her brother, would come home again. 
The magewind had borne them for only three days eastward, yet sixteen days they sailed westward 

to return. No men have ever returned from so far out on the Open Sea as did the young wizards Estarriol 
and Ged in the Fallows of winter in their open fishingboat. They met no great Storms, and steered 
steadily enough by the compass and by the star Tolbegren, taking a course somewhat northward of their 
outbound way. Thus they did not come back to Astowell, but passing by Far Toly and Sneg without 
sighting them, first raised land off the southernmost cape of Koppish. Over the waves they saw cliffs of 
stone rise like a great fortress. Seabirds cried wheeling over the breakers, and smoke of the hearthfires of 
small villages drifted blue on the wind. 
From there the voyage to Iffish was not long. They came in to Ismay harbor on a still, dark evening 
before snow. They tied up the boat Lookfar that had borne them to the coasts of death's kingdom and 
back, and went up through the narrow streets to the wizard's house. Their hearts were very light as they 
entered into the firelight and warmth under that roof; and Yarrow ran to meet them, crying with joy. 
--- 
If Estarriol of Iffish kept his promise and made a song of that first great deed of Ged's, it has been 
lost. There is a tale told in the East Reach of a boat that ran aground, days out from any shore, over the 
abyss of ocean. In Iffish they say it was Estarriol who sailed that boat, but in Tok they say it was two 
fishermen blown by a storm far out on the Open Sea, and in Holp the tale is of a Holpish fisherman, and 
tells that he could not move his boat from the unseen sands it grounded on, and so wanders there yet. So 
of the song of the Shadow there remain only a few scraps of legend, carried like driftwood from isle to 
isle over the long years. But in the Deed of Ged nothing is told of that voyage nor of Ged's meeting with 
the shadow, before ever he sailed the Dragon's 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. 
--end-- 

TheTombs of Atuan 
Ursula K. Leguin 
1970 
------ 
Prologue 
------ 
"Come home, Tenar! Come home!" 
In the deep valley, in the twilight, the apple trees were on the eve of blossoming; here and there 
among the shadowed boughs one flower had opened early, rose and white, like a faint star. Down the 
orchard aisles, in the thick, new, wet grass, the little girl ran for the joy of running; hearing the call she 
did not come at once, but made a long circle before she turned her face towards home. The mother 
waiting in the doorway of the hut, with the firelight behind her, watched the tiny figure running and 
bobbing like a bit of thistledown blown over the darkening grass beneath the trees. 
By the corner of the hut, scraping clean an earthclotted hoe, the father said, "Why do you let your 
heart hang on the child? They're coming to take her away next month. For good. Might as well bury her 
and be done with it. What's the good of clinging to one you're bound to lose? She's no good to us. If 
they'd pay for her when they took her, that would be something, but they won't. They'll take her and 
that's an end of it." 
The mother said nothing, watching the child who had stopped to look up through the trees. Over the 
high hills, above the orchards, the evening star shone piercing clear. 
"She isn't ours, she never was since they came here and said she must be the Priestess at the Tombs. 
Why can't you see that?" The man's voice was harsh with complaint and bitterness. "You have four 
others. They'll stay here, and this one won't. So, don't set your heart on her. Let her go!" 
"When the time comes," the woman said, "I will let her go." She bent to meet the child who came 
running on little, bare, white feet across the muddy ground, and gathered her up in her arms. As she 
turned to enter the hut she bent her head to kiss the child's hair, which was black; but her own hair, in the 
flicker of firelight from the hearth, was fair. 
The man stood outside, his own feet bare and cold on the ground, the clear sky of spring darkening 
above him. His face in the dusk was full of grief, a dull, heavy, angry grief that he would never find the 
words to say. At last he shrugged, and followed his wife into the firelit room that rang with children's 
voices. 
------ 
The Eaten One 
------ 

 One high horn shrilled and ceased. The silence that followed was shaken only by the sound of 
many footsteps keeping time with a drum struck softly at a slow heartpace. Through cracks in the roof of 
the Hall of the Throne, gaps between columns where a whole section of masonry and tile had collapsed, 
unsteady sunlight shone aslant. It was an hour after sunrise. The air was still and cold. Dead leaves of 
weeds that had forced up between marble pavement-tiles were outlined with frost, and crackled, 
catching on the long black robes of the priestesses. 
They came, four by four, down the vast hall between double rows of columns. The drum beat dully. 
No voice spoke, no eye watched. Torches carried by black-clad girls burned reddish in the shafts of 
sunlight, brighter in the dusk between. Outside, on the steps of the Hall of the Throne, the men stood, 
guards, trumpeters, drummers; within the great doors only women had come, dark-robed and hooded, 
walking slowly four by four towards the empty throne. 
Two came, tall women looming in their black, one of them thin and rigid, the other heavy, swaying 
with the planting of her feet. Between these two walked a child of about six. She wore a straight white 
shift. Her head and arms and legs were bare, and she was barefoot. She looked extremely small. At the 
foot of the steps leading up to the throne, where the others now waited in dark rows, the two tall women 
halted. They pushed the child forward a little. 
The throne on its high platform seemed to be curtained on each side with great webs of blackness 
dropping from the gloom of the roof; whether these were curtains, or only denser shadows, the eye could 
not make certain. The throne itself was black, with a dull glimmer of precious stones or gold on the arms 
and back, and it was huge. A man sitting in it would have been dwarfed; it was not of human 
dimensions. It was empty. Nothing sat in it but shadows. 
Alone, the child climbed up four of the seven steps of red-veined marble. They were so broad and 
high that she had to get both feet onto one step before attempting the next. On the middle step, directly 
in front of the throne, stood a large, rough block of wood, hollowed out on top. The child knelt on both 
knees and fitted her head into the hollow, turning it a little sideways. She knelt there without moving. 
A figure in a belted gown of white wool stepped suddenly out of the shadows at the right of the 
throne and strode down the steps to the child. His face was masked with white. He held a sword of 
polished steel five feet long. Without word or hesitation he swung the sword, held in both hands, up over 
the little girl's neck. The drum stopped beating. 
As the blade swung to its highest point and poised, a figure in black darted out from the left side of 
the throne, leapt down the stairs, and stayed the sacrificer's arms with slenderer arms. The sharp edge of 
the sword glittered in mid-air. So they balanced for a moment, the white figure and the black, both 
faceless, dancer-like above the motionless child whose white neck was bared by the parting of her black 
hair. 
In silence each leapt aside and up the stairs again, vanishing in the darkness behind the enormous 
throne. A priestess came forward and poured out a bowl of some liquid on the steps beside the kneeling 
child. The stain looked black in the dimness of the hall. 
The child got up and descended the four stairs laboriously. When she stood at the bottom, the two 
tall priestesses put on her a black robe and hood and mantle, and turned her around again to face the 
steps, the dark stain, the throne. 
"O let the Nameless Ones behold the girl given to them, who is verily the one born ever nameless. 
Let them accept her life and the years of her life until her death, which is also theirs. Let them find her 

acceptable. Let her be eaten!" 
Other voices, shrill and harsh as trumpets, replied: "She is eaten! She is eaten!" 
The little girl stood looking from under her black cowl up at the throne. The jewels inset in the 
huge clawed arms and the back were glazed with dust, and on the carven back were cobwebs and 
whitish stains of owl droppings. The three highest steps directly before the throne, above the step on 
which she had knelt, had never been climbed by mortal feet. They were so thick with dust that they 
looked like one slant of gray soil, the planes of the red-veined marble wholly hidden by the unstirred, 
untrodden siftings of how many years, how many centuries. 
"She is eaten! She is eaten!" 
Now the drum, abrupt, began to sound again, beating a quicker pace. 
Silent and shuffling, the procession formed and moved away from the throne, eastward towards the 
bright, distant square of the doorway. On either side, the thick double columns, like the calves of 
immense pale legs, went up to the dusk under the ceiling. Among the priestesses, and now all in black 
like them, the child walked, her small bare feet treading solemnly over the frozen weeds, the icy stones. 
When sunlight slanting through the ruined roof flashed across her way, she did not look up. 
Guards held the great doors wide. The black procession came out into the thin, cold light and wind 
of early morning. The sun dazzled, swimming above the eastern vastness. Westward, the mountains 
caught its yellow light, as did the facade of the Hall of the Throne. The other buildings, lower on the hill, 
still lay in purplish shadow, except for the Temple of the God-Brothers across the way on a little knoll: 
its roof, newly gilt, flashed the day back in glory. The black line of priestesses, four by four, wound 
down the Hill of the Tombs, and as they went they began softly to chant. The tune was on three notes 
only, and the word that was repeated over and over was a word so old it had lost its meaning, like a 
signpost still standing when the road is gone. Over and over they chanted the empty word. All that day 
of the Remaking of the Priestess was filled with the low chanting of women's voices, a dry unceasing 
drone. 
The little girl was taken from room to room, from temple to temple. In one place salt was placed 
upon her tongue; in another she knelt facing west while her hair was cut short and washed with oil and 
scented vinegar; in another she lay face down on a slab of black marble behind an altar while shrill 
voices sang a lament for the dead. Neither she nor any of the priestesses ate food or drank water all that 
day. As the evening star set, the little girl was put to bed, naked between sheepskin rugs, in a room she 
had never slept in before. It was in a house that had been locked for years, unlocked only that day. The 
room was higher than it was long, and had no windows. There was a dead smell in it, still and stale. The 
silent women left her there in the dark. 
She held still, lying just as they had put her. Her eyes were wide open. She lay so for a long time. 
She saw light shake on the high wall. Someone came quietly along the corridor, shielding a 
rushlight so it showed no more light than a firefly. A husky whisper: "Ho, are you there, Tenar?" 
The child did not reply. 
A head poked in the doorway, a strange head, hairless as a peeled potato, and of the same yellowish 
color. The eyes were like potato-eyes, brown and tiny. The nose was dwarfed by great, fiat slabs of 
cheek, and the mouth was a lipless slit. The child stared unmoving at this face. Her eyes were large, 
dark, and fixed. 
"Ho, Tenar, my little honeycomb, there you are!" The voice was husky, high as a woman's voice 
but not a woman's voice. "I shouldn't be here, I belong outside the door, on the porch, that's where I go. 

But I had to see how my little Tenar is, after all the long day of it, eh, how's my poor little honeycomb?" 
He moved towards her, noiseless and burly, and put out his hand as if to smooth back her hair. 
"I am not Tenar any more," the child said, staring up at him. His hand stopped; he did not touch her. 
"No," he said, after a moment, whispering. "I know. I know. Now you're the little Eaten One. But 
I..." 
She said nothing. 
"It was a hard day for a little one," the man said, shuffling, the tiny light flickering in his big yellow 
hand. 
"You should not be in this House, Manan." 
"No. No. I know. I shouldn't be in this House. Well, good night, little one... Good night." 
The child said nothing. Manan slowly turned around and went away. The glimmer died from the 
high cell walls. The little girl, who had no name any more but Arha, the Eaten One, lay on her back 
looking steadily at the dark. 
------ 
The Wall Around the Place 
------ 
As she grew older she lost all remembrance of her mother, without knowing she had lost it. She 
belonged here, at the Place of the Tombs; she had always belonged here. Only sometimes in the long 
evenings of July as she watched the western mountains, dry and lion-colored in the afterglow of sunset, 
she would think of a fire that had burned on a hearth, long ago, with the same clear yellow light. And 
with this came a memory of being held, which was strange, for here she was seldom even touched; and 
the memory of a pleasant smell, the fragrance of hair freshly washed and rinsed in sage-scented water, 
fair long hair, the color of sunset and firelight. That was all she had left. 
She knew more than she remembered, of course, for she had been told the whole story. When she 
was seven or eight years old, and first beginning to wonder who indeed this person called "Arha" was, 
she had gone to her guardian, the Warden Manan, and said, "Tell me how I was chosen, Manan." 
"Oh, you know all that, little one." 
And indeed she did; the tall, dry-voiced priestess Thar had told her till she knew the words by heart, 
and she recited them: "Yes, I know. At the death of the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, the 
ceremonies of burial and purification are completed within one month by the moon's calendar. After this 
certain of the Priestesses and Wardens of the Place of the Tombs go forth across the desert, among the 
towns and villages of Atuan, seeking and asking. They seek the girl-child who was born on the night of 
the Priestess' death. When they find such a child, they wait and they watch. The child must be sound of 
body and of mind, and as it grows it must not suffer from rickets nor the smallpox nor any deformity, 
nor become blind. If it reaches the age of five years unblemished, then it is known that the body of the 
child is indeed the new body of the Priestess who died. And the child is made known to the Godking in 
Awabath, and brought here to her Temple and instructed for a year. And at the year's end she is taken to 
the Hall of the Throne and her name is given back to those who are her Masters, the Nameless Ones: for 
she is the nameless one, the Priestess Ever Reborn." 

 This was all word for word as Thar had told her, and she had never dared ask for a word more. The 
thin priestess was not cruel, but she was very cold and lived by an iron law, and Arha was in awe of her. 
But she was not in awe of Manan, far from it, and she would command him, "Now tell me how I was 
chosen!" And he would tell her again. 
"We left here, going north and west, in the third day of the moon's waxing; for Arha-that-was had 
died in the third day of the last moon. And first we went to Tenacbah, which is a great city, though those 
who've seen both say it's no more to Awabath than a flea to a cow. But it's big enough for me, there must 
be ten hundred houses in Tenacbahl And we went on to Gar. But nobody in those cities had a baby girl 
born to them on the third day of the moon a month before; there were some had boys, but boys won't 
do... So we went into the hill country north of Gar, to the towns and villages. That's my own land. I was 
born in the hills there, where the rivers run, and the land is green. Not in this desert." Manan's husky 
voice would get a strange sound when he said that, and his small eyes would be quite hidden in their 
folds; he would pause a little, and at last go on. "And so we found and spoke to all those who were 
parents of babies born in the last months. And some would lie to us. `Oh yes, surely our baby girl was 
born on the moon's third day!' For poor folk, you know, are often glad to get rid of girl-babies. And there 
were others who were so poor, living in lonely huts in the valleys of the hills, that they kept no count of 
days and scarce knew how to tell the turn of time, so they could not say for certain how old their baby 
was. But we could always come at the truth, by asking long enough. But it was slow work. At last we 
found a girlchild, in a village of ten houses, in the orchard-vales westward of Entat. Eight months old 
she was, so long had we been looking. But she had been born on the night that the Priestess of the 
Tombs had died, and within the very hour of her death. And she was a fine baby, sitting up on her 
mother's knee and looking with bright eyes at all of us, crowding into the one room of the house like 
bats into a cave! The father was a poor man. He tended the apple trees of the rich man's orchard, and had 
nothing of his own but five children and a goat. Not even the house was his. So there we all crowded in, 
and you could tell by the way the priestesses looked at the baby and spoke among themselves that they 
thought they had found the Reborn One at last. And the mother could tell this too. She held the baby and 
never said a word. Well, so, the next day we came back. And look here! The little bright-eyed baby lying 
in a cot of rushes weeping and screaming, and all over its body weals and red rashes of fever, and the 
mother wailing louder than the baby, `Oh! Oh! My babe hath the Witch-Fingers on her!' That's how she 
said it; the smallpox she meant. In my village, too, they called it the Witch-Fingers. But Kossil, she who 
is now the High Priestess of the Godking, she went to the cot and picked up the baby. The others had all 
drawn back, and I with them; I don't value my life very high, but who enters a house where smallpox is? 
But she had no fear, not that one. She picked up the baby and said, `It has no fever.' And she spat on her 
finger and rubbed at the red marks, and they came off. They were only berry juice. The poor silly mother 
had thought to fool us and keep her child!" Manan laughed heartily at this; his yellow face hardly 
changed, but his sides heaved. "So, her husband beat her, for he was afraid of the wrath of the 
priestesses. And soon we came back to the desert, but each year one of the people of the Place would 
return to the village among the apple orchards, and see how the child got on. So five years passed, and 
then Thar and Kossil made the journey, with the Temple guards, and soldiers of the red helmet sent by 
the Godking to escort them safely. They brought the child back here, for it was indeed the Priestess of 
the Tombs reborn, and here it belonged. And who was the child, eh, little one?" 
"Me," said Arha, looking off into the distance as if to see something she could not see, something 
gone out of sight. 

 Once she asked, "What did the... the mother do, when they came to take the child away?" 
But Manan didn't know; he had not gone with the priestesses on that final journey. 
And she could not remember. What was the good in remembering? It was gone, all gone. She had 
come where she must come. In all the world she knew only one place: the Place of the Tombs of Atuan. 
In her first year there she had slept in the big dormitory with the other novices, girls between four 
and fourteen. Even then Manan had been set apart among the Ten Wardens as her particular guardian, 
and her cot had been in a little alcove, partly separated from the long, low-beamed main room of the 
dormitory in the Big House where the girls giggled and whispered before they slept, and yawned and 
plaited one another's hair in the gray light of morning. When her name was taken from her and she 
became Arha, she slept alone in the Small House, in the bed and in the room that would be her bed and 
her room for the rest of her life. That house was hers, the House of the One Priestess, and no one might 
enter it without her permission. When she was quite little still, she enjoyed hearing people knock 
submissively on her door, and saying, "You may come in," and it annoyed her that the two High 
Priestesses, Kossil and Thar, took their permission for granted and entered her house without knocking. 
The days went by, the years went by, all alike. The girls of the Place of the Tombs spent their time 
at classes and disciplines. They did not play any games. There was no time for games. They learned the 
sacred songs and the sacred dances, the histories of the Kargad Lands, and the mysteries of whichever of 
the gods they were dedicated to: the Godking who ruled in Awabath, or the Twin Brothers, Atwah and 
Wuluah. Of them all, only Arha learned the rites of the Nameless Ones, and these were taught her by 
one person, Thar, the High Priestess of the Twin Gods. This took her away from the others for an hour 
or more daily, but most of her day, like theirs, was spent simply working. They learned how to spin and 
weave the wool of their flocks, and how to plant and harvest and prepare the food they always ate: 
lentils, buckwheat ground to a coarse meal for porridge or a fine flour for unleavened bread, onions, 
cabbages, goat-cheese, apples, and honey. 
The best thing that could happen was to be allowed to go fishing in the murky green river that 
flowed through the desert a half mile northeast of the Place; to take along an apple or a cold buckwheat 
bannock for lunch and sit all day in the dry sunlight among the reeds, watching the slow green water run 
and the cloudshadows change slowly on the mountains. But if you squealed with excitement when the 
line tensed and you swung in a flat, glittering fish to flop on the riverbank and drown in air, then 
Mebbeth would hiss like an adder, "Be still, you screeching fool!" Mebbeth, who served in the 
Godking's temple, was a dark woman, still young, but hard and sharp as obsidian. Fishing was her 
passion. You had to keep on her good side, and never make a sound, or she would not take you out to 
fish again; and then you'd never get to the river except to fetch water in summer when the wells ran low. 
That was a dreary business, to trudge through the searing white heat a half mile down to the river, fill the 
two buckets on their carrying pole, and then set off as fast as possible uphill to the Place. The first 
hundred yards were easy, but then the buckets began to grow heavier, and the pole burned your 
shoulders like a bar of hot iron, and the light glared on the dry road, and every step was harder and 
slower. At last you got to the cool shade of the back courtyard of the Big House by the vegetable patch, 
and dumped the buckets into the great cistern with a splash. And then you had to turn around to do it all 
over again, and again, and again. 
Within the precincts of the Place -that was all the name it had or needed, for it was the most ancient 
and sacred of all places in the Four Lands of the Kargish Empire- a couple of hundred people lived, and 
there were many buildings: three temples, the Big House and the Small House, the quarters of the 

eunuch wardens, and close outside the wall the guards' barracks and many slaves' huts, the storehouses 
and sheep pens and goat pens and farm buildings. It looked like a little town, seen from a distance, from 
up on the dry hills westward where nothing grew but sage, wire-grass in straggling clumps, small weeds 
and desert herbs. Even from away off on the eastern plains, looking up one might see the gold roof of 
the Temple of the Twin Gods wink and glitter beneath the mountains, like a speck of mica in a shelf of 
rock. 
That temple itself was a cube of stone, plastered white, windowless, with a low porch and door. 
Showier, and centuries newer, was the Temple of the God-king a little below it, with a high portico and 
a row of thick white columns with painted capitals - each one a solid log of cedar, brought on shipboard 
from Hur-atHur where there are forests, and dragged by the straining of twenty slaves across the barren 
plains to the Place. Only after a traveler approaching from the east had seen the gold roof and the bright 
columns would he see, higher up on the Hill of the Place, above them all, tawny and ruinous as the 
desert itself, the oldest of the temples of his race: the huge, low Hall of the Throne, with patched walls 
and flattish, crumbling dome. 
Behind the Hall and encircling the whole crest of the hill ran a massive wall of rock, laid without 
mortar and half fallen down in many places. Inside the loop of the wall several black stones eighteen or 
twenty feet high stuck up like huge fingers out of the earth. Once the eye saw them it kept returning to 
them. They stood there full of meaning, and yet there was no saying what they meant. There were nine 
of them. One stood straight, the others leaned more or less, two had fallen. They were crusted with gray 
and orange lichen as if splotched with paint, all but one, which was naked and black, with a dull gloss to 
it. It was smooth to the touch, but on the others, under the crust of lichen, vague carvings could be seen, 
or felt with the fingers - shapes, signs. These nine stones were the Tombs of Atuan. They had stood 
there, it was said, since the time of the first men, since Earthsea was created. They had been planted in 
the darkness when the lands were raised up from the ocean's depths. They were older by far than the 
God-kings of Kargad, older than the Twin Gods, older than light. They were the tombs of those who 
ruled before the world of men came to be, the ones not named, and she who served them had no name. 
She did not go among them often, and no one else ever set foot on that ground where they stood, on 
the hilltop within the rock wall behind the Hall of the Throne. Twice a year, at the full moon nearest the 
equinox of spring and of autumn, there was a sacrifice before the Throne and she came out from the low 
back door of the Hall carrying a great brass basin full of smoking goat's blood; this she must pour out, 
half at the foot of the standing black stone, half over one of the fallen stones which lay embedded in the 
rocky dirt, stained by the blood-offering of centuries. 
Sometimes Arha went by herself in the early morning and wandered among the Stones trying to 
make out the dim humps and scratches of the carvings, brought out more clearly by the low angle of the 
light; or she would sit there and look up at the mountains westward, and down at the roofs and walls of 
the Place all laid out below, and watch the first stirrings of activity around the Big House and the guards' 
barracks, and the flocks of sheep and goats going off to their sparse pastures by the river. There was 
never anything to do among the Stones. She went only because it was permitted her to go there, because 
there she was alone. It was a dreary place. Even in the heat of noon in the desert summer there was a 
coldness about it. Sometimes the wind whistled a little between the two stones that stood closest 
together, leaning together as if telling secrets. But no secret was told. 
From the Tomb Wall another, lower rock wall ran, making a long irregular semicircle about the 
Hill of the Place and then trailing off northward towards the river. It did not so much protect the Place, 

as cut it in two: on one side the temples and houses of the priestesses and wardens, on the other the 
quarters of the guards and of the slaves who farmed and herded and foraged for the Place. None of these 
ever crossed the wall, except that on certain very holy festivals the guards, and their drummers and 
players of the horn, would attend the procession of the priestesses; but they did not enter the portals of 
the temples. No other men set foot upon the inner ground of the Place. There had once been pilgrimages, 
kings and chieftains coming from the Four Lands to worship there; the first God-king, a century and a 
half ago, had come to enact the rites of his own temple. Yet even he could not enter among the 
Tombstones, even he had had to eat and sleep outside the wall around the Place. 
One could climb that wall easily enough, fitting toes into crevices. The Eaten One and a girl called 
Penthe were sitting up on the wall one afternoon in late spring. 
They were both twelve years old. They were supposed to be in the weaving room of the Big House, 
a huge stone attic; they were supposed to be at the great looms always warped with dull black wool, 
weaving black cloth for robes. They had slipped outside for a drink at the well in the courtyard, and then 
Arha had said, "Come on!" and had led the other girl down the hill, around out of sight of the Big House, 
to the wall. Now they sat on top of it, ten feet up, their bare legs dangling down on the outside, looking 
over the flat plains that went on and on to the east and north. 
"I'd like to see the sea," said Penthe. 
"What for?" said Arha, chewing a bitter stem of milkweed she had picked from the wall. The barren 
land was just past its flowering. All the small desert blossoms, yellow and rose and white, low-growing 
and quick-flowering, were going to seed, scattering tiny plumes and parasols of ash white on the wind, 
dropping their hooked, ingenious burrs. The ground under the apple trees of the orchard was a drift of 
bruised white and pink. The branches were green, the only green trees within miles of the Place. 
Everything else, from horizon to horizon, was a dull, tawny, desert color, except that the mountains had 
a silvery bluish tinge from the first buds of the flowering sage. 
"Oh, I don't know what for. I'd just like to see something different. It's always the same here. 
Nothing happens." 
"All that happens everywhere, begins here," said Arha. 
"Oh, I know... But I'd like to see some of it happening!" 
Penthe smiled. She was a soft, comfortable-looking girl. She scratched the soles of her bare feet on 
the sunwarmed rocks, and after a while went on, "You know, I used to live by the sea when I was little. 
Our village was right behind the dunes, and we used to go down and play on the beach sometimes. Once 
I remember we saw a fleet of ships going by, way out at sea. The ships looked like dragons with red 
wings. Some of them had real necks, with dragon heads. They came sailing by Atuan, but they weren't 
Kargish ships. They came from the west, from the Inner Lands, the headman said. Everybody came 
down to watch them. I think they were afraid they might land. They just went by, nobody knew where 
they were going. Maybe to make war in Karego-At. But think of it, they really came from the sorcerers' 
islands, where all the people are the color of dirt and they can all cast a spell on you easy as winking." 
"Not on me," Arha said fiercely. "I wouldn't have looked at them. They're vile accursed sorcerers. 
How dare they sail so close to the Holy Land?" 
"Oh, well, I suppose the God-king will conquer them some day and make them all slaves. But I 
wish I could see the sea again. There used to be little octopuses in the tide pools, and if you shouted 
`Boo!' at them they turned all white. -There comes that old Manan, looking for you." 
Arha's guard and servant was coming slowly along the inner side of the wall. He would stoop to 

pull a wild onion, of which he held a large, limp bunch, then straighten up and look about him with his 
small, dull, brown eyes. He had grown fatter with the years, and his hairless yellow skin glistened in the 
sun. 
"Slide down part way on the men's side," Arha hissed, and both girls wriggled lithe as lizards down 
the far side of the wall until they could cling there just below the top, invisible from the inner side. They 
heard Manan's slow footsteps coming by. 
"Hoo! Hoo! Potato face!" crooned Arha, a whispering jeer faint as the wind among the grasses. 
The heavy tread halted. "Ho there," said the uncertain voice. "Little one? Arha?" 
Silence. 
Manan went forward. 
"Hoo-oo! Potato face!" 
"Hoo, potato belly!" Penthe whispered in imitation, and then moaned, trying to suppress giggles. 
"Somebody there?" 
Silence. 
"Oh well, well, well," the eunuch sighed, and his slow feet went on. When he was gone over the 
shoulder of the slope, the girls scrambled back up onto the top of the wall. Penthe was pink with sweat 
and giggles, but Arha looked savage. 
"The stupid old bellwether, following me around everywhere!" 
"He has to," Penthe said reasonably. "It's his job, looking after you." 
"Those I serve look after me. I please them; I need please nobody else. These old women and halfmen, 
these people should leave me alone. I am the One Priestess!" 
Penthe stared at the other girl. "Oh," she said feebly, "oh, I know you are, Arha-" 
"Then they should let me be. And not order me about all the time!" 
Penthe said nothing for a while, but sighed, and sat swinging her plump legs and gazing at the vast, 
pale lands below, that rose so slowly to a high, vague, immense horizon. 
"You'll get to give the orders pretty soon, you know," she said at last, quietly. "In two more years 
we won't be children any more. We'll be fourteen. I'll go into the Godking's temple, and things will be 
about the same for me. But you'll really be the High Priestess then. Even Kossil and Thar will have to 
obey you." 
The Eaten One said nothing. Her face was set, her eyes under black brows caught the light of the 
sky in a pale glitter. 
"We ought to go back," Penthe said. 
"No." 
"But the weaving mistress might tell Thar. And soon it'll be time for the Nine Chants." 
"I'm staying here. You stay, too." 
"They won't punish you, but they will punish me," Penthe said in her mild way. Arha did not reply. 
Penthe sighed, and stayed. The sun was sinking into haze high above the plains. Far away on the long, 
gradual slant of the land, sheep bells clanked faintly and lambs bleated. The spring wind blew in dry, 
faint gusts, sweetsmelling. 
The Nine Chants were nearly over when the two girls returned. Mebbeth had seen them sitting on 
the `Men's Wall' and had reported this to her superior, Kossil, High Priestess of the Godking. 
Kossil was heavy-footed, heavy-faced. Without expression in face or voice she spoke to the two 
girls, telling them to follow her. She led them through the stone hallways of the Big House, out the front 

door, up the knoll to the Temple of Atwah and Wuluah. There she spoke with the High Priestess of that 
temple, Thar, tall and dry and thin as the legbone of a deer. 
Kossil said to Penthe, "Take off your gown." 
She whipped the girl with a bundle of reed canes, which cut the skin a little. Penthe bore this 
patiently, with silent tears. She was sent back to the weaving room without supper, and the next day also 
she would go without food. "If you are found climbing over the Men's Wall again," Kossil said, "there 
will be very much worse things than this happen to you. Do you understand, Penthe?" Kossil's voice was 
soft, but not kindly. Penthe said, "Yes," and slipped away, cowering and flinching as her heavy clothing 
rubbed the cuts on her back. 
Arha had stood beside Thar to watch the whipping. Now she watched Kossil clean the canes of the 
whip. 
Thar said to her, "It is not fitting that you be seen climbing and running with other girls. You are 
Arha." 
She stood sullen and did not reply. 
"It is better that you do only what is needful for you to do. You are Arha." 
For a moment the girl raised her eyes to Thar's face, then to Kossil's, and there was a depth of hate 
or rage in her look that was terrible to see. But the thin priestess showed no concern; rather she 
confirmed, leaning forward a little, almost whispering, "You are Arha. There is nothing left. It was all 
eaten." 
"It was all eaten," the girl repeated, as she had repeated daily, all the days of her life since she was 
six. 
Thar bowed her head slightly; so did Kossil, as she put away the whip. The girl did not bow, but 
turned submissively and left. 
After the supper of potatoes and spring onions, eaten in silence in the narrow, dark refectory, after 
the chanting of the evening hymns, and the placing of the sacred words upon the doors, and the brief 
Ritual of the Unspoken, the work of the day was done. Now the girls might go up to the dormitory and 
play games with dice and sticks, so long as the single rushlight burned, and whisper in the dark from bed 
to bed. Arha set off across the courts and slopes of the Place as she did every night, to the Small House 
where she slept alone. 
The night wind was sweet. The stars of spring shone thick, like drifts of daisies in spring meadows, 
like the glittering of light on the April sea. But the girl had no memory of meadows or the sea. She did 
not look up. 
"Ho there, little one!" 
"Manan," she said indifferently. 
The big shadow shuffled up beside her, starlight glinting on his hairless pate. 
"Were you punished?" 
"I can't be punished." 
"No... That's so..." 
"They can't punish me. They don't dare." 
He stood with his big hands hanging, dim and bulky. She smelled wild onion, and the sweaty, sagey 
smell of his old black robes, which were torn at the hem, and too short for him. 
"They can't touch me. I am Arha," she said in a shrill, fierce voice, and burst into tears. 
The big, waiting hands came up and drew her to him, held her gently, smoothed her braided hair. 

"There, there. Little honeycomb, little girl..." She heard the husky murmur in the deep hollow of his 
chest, and clung to him. Her tears stopped soon, but she held onto Manan as if she could not stand up. 
"Poor little one," he whispered, and picking the child up carried her to the doorway of the house 
where she slept alone. He set her down. 
"All right now, little one?" 
She nodded, turned from him, and entered the dark house. 
------ 
The Prisoners 
------ 
Kossil's steps sounded along the hallway of the Small House, even and deliberate. The tall, heavy 
figure filled the doorway of the room, shrank as the priestess bowed down touching one knee to the 
floor, swelled as she straightened to her full height. 
"Mistress." 
"What is it, Kossil?" 
"I have been permitted to look after certain matters pertaining to the Domain of the Nameless Ones, 
until now. If you so desire, it is now time for you to learn, and see, and take charge of these matters, 
which you have not yet remembered in this life." 
The girl had been sitting in her windowless room, supposedly meditating, actually doing nothing 
and thinking almost nothing. It took some time for the fixed, dull, haughty expression of her face to 
change. Yet it did change, though she tried to conceal it. She said, with a certain slyness, "The 
Labyrinth?" 
"We will not enter the Labyrinth. But it will be necessary to cross the Undertomb." 
There was a tone in Kossil's voice that might have been fear, or might have been a pretense of fear, 
intended to frighten Arha. The girl stood up without haste and said indifferently, "Very well." But in her 
heart, as she followed the heavy figure of the Godking's priestess, she exulted: At last! At last! I shall see 
my own domain at last! 
She was fifteen. It was over a year since she had made her crossing into womanhood and at the 
same time had come into her full powers as the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, highest of all high 
priestesses of the Kargad Lands, one whom not even the Godking himself might command. They all 
bowed the knee to her now, even grim Thar and Kossil. All spoke to her with elaborate deference. But 
nothing had changed. Nothing happened. Once the ceremonies of her consecration were over, the days 
went on as they had always gone. There was wool to be spun, black cloth to be woven, meal to be 
ground, rites to be performed; the Nine Chants must be sung nightly, the doorways blessed, the Stones 
fed with goat's blood twice a year, the dances of the dark of the moon danced before the Empty Throne. 
And so the whole year had passed, just as the years before it had passed, and were all the years of her 
life to pass so? 
Her boredom rose so strong in her sometimes that it felt like terror: it took her by the throat. Not 
long ago she had been driven to speak of it. She had to talk, she thought, or she would go mad. It was 

Manan she talked to. Pride kept her from confiding in the other girls, and caution kept her from 
confession to the older women, but Manan was nothing, a faithful old bellwether; it didn't matter what 
she said to him. To her surprise he had had an answer for her. 
"Long ago," he said, "you know, little one, before our four lands joined together into an empire, 
before there was a Godking over us all, there were a lot of lesser kings, princes, chiefs. They were 
always quarreling with each other. And they'd come here to settle their quarrels. That was how it was, 
they'd come from our land Atuan, and from Karego-At, and Atnini, and even from Hur-at-Hur, all the 
chiefs and princes with their servants and their armies. And they'd ask you what to do. And you'd go 
before the Empty Throne, and give them the counsel of the Nameless Ones. Well, that was long ago. 
After a while the Priest-Kings came to rule all of Karego-At, and soon they were ruling Atuan; and now 
for four or five lifetimes of men the Godkings have ruled all the four lands together, and made them an 
empire. And so things are changed. The Godking can put down the unruly chiefs, and settle all the 
quarrels himself. And being a god, you see, he doesn't have to consult the Nameless Ones very often." 
Arha stopped to think this over. Time did not mean very much, here in the desert land, under the 
unchanging Stones, leading a life that had been led in the same way since the beginning of the world. 
She was not accustomed to thinking about things changing, old ways dying and new ones arising. She 
did not find it comfortable to look at things in that light. "The powers of the Godking are much less than 
the powers of the Ones I serve," she said, frowning. 
"Surely... Surely... But one doesn't go about saying that to a god, little honeycomb. Nor to his 
priestess." 
And catching his small, brown, twinkling eye, she thought of Kissil, High Priestess of the Godking, 
whom she had feared ever since she first came to the Place; and she took his meaning. 
"But the Godking, and his people, are neglecting the worship of the Tombs. No one comes." 
"Well, he sends prisoners here to sacrifice. He doesn't neglect that. Nor the gifts due to the 
Nameless Ones." 
"Gifts! His temple is painted fresh every year, there's a hundredweight of gold on the altar, the 
lamps burn attar of roses! And look at the Hall of the Throne- holes in the roof, and the dome cracking, 
and the walls full of mice, and owls, and bats... But all the same it will outlast the Godking and all his 
temples, and all the kings that come after him. It was there before them, and when they're all gone it will 
still be there. It is the center of things." 
"It is the center of things." 
"There are riches there; Thar tells me about them sometimes. Enough to fill the Godking's temple 
ten times over. Gold and trophies given ages ago, a hundred generations, who knows how long. They're 
all locked away in the pits and vaults, underground. They won't take me there yet, they keep me waiting 
and waiting. But I know what it's like. There are rooms underneath the Hall, underneath the whole Place, 
under where we stand now. There's a great maze of tunnels, a Labyrinth. It's like a great dark city, under 
the hill. Full of gold, and the swords of old heroes, and old crowns, and bones, and years, and silence." 
She spoke as if in trance, in rapture. Manan watched her. His slabby face never expressed much but 
stolid, careful sadness; it was sadder than usual now. "Well, and you're mistress of all that," he said. 
"The silence, and the dark." 
"I am. But they won't show me anything, only the rooms above ground, behind the Throne. They 
haven't even shown me the entrances to the places underground; they just mumble about them 
sometimes. They're keeping my own domain from me! Why do they make me wait and wait?" 

 "You are young. And perhaps," Manan said in his husky alto, "perhaps they're afraid, little one. It's 
not their domain, after all. It's yours. They are in danger when they enter there. There's no mortal that 
doesn't fear the Nameless Ones." 
Arha said nothing, but her eyes flashed. Again Manan had shown her a new way of seeing things. 
So formidable, so cold, so strong had Thar and Kossil always seemed to her, that she had never even 
imagined their being afraid. Yet Manan was right. They feared those places, those powers of which Arha 
was part, to which she belonged. They were afraid to go into the dark places, lest they be eaten. 
Now, as she went with Kossil down the steps of the Small House and up the steep winding path 
towards the Hall of the Throne, she recalled that conversation with Manan, and exulted again. No matter 
where they took her, what they showed her, she would not be afraid. She would know her way. 
A little behind her on the path, Kossil spoke. "One of my mistress' duties, as she knows, is the 
sacrifice of certain prisoners, criminals of noble birth, who by sacrilege or treason have sinned against 
our lord the Godking." 
"Or against the Nameless Ones," said Arha. 
"Truly. Now it is not fitting that the Eaten One while yet a child should undertake this duty. But my 
mistress is no longer a child. There are prisoners in the Room of Chains, sent a month ago by the grace 
of our lord the Godking from his city Awabath." 
"I did not know prisoners had come. Why did I not know?" 
"Prisoners are brought at night, and secretly, in the way prescribed of old in the rituals of the 
Tombs. It is the secret way my mistress will follow, if she takes the path that leads along the wall." 
Arha turned off the path to follow the great wall of stone that bounded the Tombs behind the 
domed hall. The rocks it was built of were massive; the least of them would outweigh a man, and the 
largest were big as wagons. Though unshapen they were carefully fitted and interlocked. Yet in places 
the height of the wall had slipped down and the rocks lay in a shapeless heap. Only a vast span of time 
could do that, the desert centuries of fiery days and frozen nights, the millennial, imperceptible 
movements of the hills themselves. 
"It is very easy to climb the Tomb Wall," Arha said as they went along beneath it. 
"We have not men enough to rebuild it," Kossil replied. 
"We have men enough to guard it." 
"Only slaves. They cannot be trusted." 
"They can be trusted if they're frightened. Let the penalty be the same for them as for the stranger 
they allow to set foot on the holy ground within the wall." 
"What is that penalty?" Kossil did not ask to learn the answer. She had taught the answer to Arha, 
long ago. 
"To be decapitated before the Throne." 
"Is it my mistress' will that a guard be set upon the Tomb Wall?" 
"It is," the girl answered. Inside her long black sleeves her fingers clenched with elation. She knew 
Kossil did not want to spare a slave to this duty of watching the wall, and indeed it was a useless duty, 
for what strangers ever came here? It was not likely that any man would wander, by mischance or intent, 
anywhere within a mile of the Place without being seen; he certainly would get nowhere near the 
Tombs. But a guard was an honor due them, and Kossil could not well argue against it. She must obey 
Arha. 
"Here," said her cold voice. 

 Arha stopped. She had often walked this path around the Tomb Wall, and knew it as she knew 
every foot of the Place, every rock and thorn and thistle. The great rock wall reared up thrice her height 
to the left; to the right the hill shelved away into a shallow, arid valley, which soon rose again towards 
the foothills of the western range. She looked over all the ground nearby, and saw nothing that she had 
not seen before. 
"Under the red rocks, mistress." 
A few yards down the slope an outcropping of red lava made a stair or little cliff in the hill. When 
she went down to it and stood on the level before it, facing the rocks, Arha realized that they looked like 
a rough doorway, four feet high. 
"What must be done?" 
She had learned long ago that in the holy places it is no use trying to open a door until you know 
how the door is opened. 
"My mistress has all the keys to the dark places." 
Since the rites of her coming of age, Arha had worn on her belt an iron ring on which hung a little 
dagger and thirteen keys, some long and heavy, some small as fishhooks. She lifted the ring and spread 
the keys. "That one," Kossil said, pointing; and then placed her thick forefinger on a crevice between 
two red, pitted rock-surfaces. 
"The key, a long shaft of iron with two ornate wards, entered the crevice. Arha turned it to the left, 
using both hands, for it was stiff to move; yet it turned smoothly. 
"Now?" 
"Together-" 
Together they pushed at the rough rock face to the left of the keyhole. Heavily, but without catch 
and with very little noise, an uneven section of the red rock moved inward until a narrow slit was 
opened. Inside it was blackness. 
Arha stooped and entered. 
Kossil, a heavy woman heavily clothed, had to squeeze through the narrow opening. As soon as she 
was inside she backed against the door and, straining, pushed it shut. 
It was absolutely black. There was no light. The dark seemed to press like wet felt upon the open 
eyes. 
They crouched, almost doubled over, for the place they stood in was not four feet high, and so 
narrow that Arha's groping hands touched damp rock at once to right and left. 
"Did you bring a light?" 
She whispered, as one does in the dark. 
"I brought no light," Kossil replied, behind her. Kossil's voice too was lowered, but it had an odd 
sound to it, as if she were smiling. Kossil never smiled. Arha's heart jumped; the blood pounded in her 
throat. She said to herself, fiercely: This is my place, I belong here, I will not be afraid! 
Aloud she said nothing. She started forward; there was only one way to go. It went into the hill, and 
downward. 
Kossil followed, breathing heavily, her garments brushing and scraping against rock and earth. 
All at once the roof lifted: Arha could stand straight, and stretching out her hands she felt no walls. 
The air, which had been close and earthy, touched her face with a cooler dampness, and faint 
movements in it gave the sense of a great expanse. Arha took a few cautious steps forward into the utter 
blackness. A pebble, slipping under her sandaled foot, struck another pebble, and the tiny sound 

wakened echoes, many echoes, minute, remote, yet more remote. The cavern must be immense, high and 
broad, yet not empty: something in its darkness, surfaces of invisible objects or partitions, broke the 
echo into a thousand fragments. 
"Here we must be beneath the Stones," the girl said whispering, and her whisper ran out into the 
hollow blackness and frayed into threads of sound as fine as spiderweb, that clung to the hearing for a 
long time. 
"Yes. This is the Undertomb. Go on. I cannot stay here. Follow the wall to the left. Pass three 
openings." 
Kossil's whisper hissed (and the tiny echoes hissed after it). She was afraid, she was indeed afraid. 
She did not like to be here among the Nameless Ones, in their tombs, in their caves, in the dark. It was 
not her place, she did not belong here. 
"I shall come here with a torch," Arha said, guiding herself along the wall of the cavern by the 
touch of her fingers, wondering at the strange shapes of the rock, hollows and swellings and fine curves 
and edges, rough as lace here, smooth as brass there: surely this was carven work. Perhaps the whole 
cavern was the work of sculptors of the ancient days? 
"Light is forbidden here." Kossil's whisper was sharp. Even as she said it, Arha knew it must be so. 
This was the very home of darkness, the inmost center of the night. 
Three times her fingers swept across a gap in the complex, rocky blackness. The fourth time she 
felt for the height and width of the opening, and entered it. Kossil came behind. 
In this tunnel, which went upward again at a slight slant, they passed an opening on the left, and 
then at a branching way took the right: all by feel, by groping, in the blindness of the underearth and the 
silence inside the ground. In such a passageway as this, one must reach out almost constantly to touch 
both sides of the tunnel, lest one of the openings that must be counted be missed, or the forking of the 
way go unnoticed. Touch was one's whole guidance; one could not see the way, but held it in one's 
hands. 
"Is this the Labyrinth?" 
"No. This is the lesser maze, which is beneath the Throne." 
"Where is the entrance to the Labyrinth?" 
Arha liked this game in the dark, she wanted a greater puzzle to be set her. 
"The second opening we passed in the Undertomb. Feel for a door to the right now, a wooden door, 
perhaps we've passed it already-" 
Arha heard Kossil's hands fumbling uneasily along the wall, scraping on the rough rock. She kept 
her fingertips light against the rock, and in a moment felt the smooth grain of wood beneath them. She 
pushed on it, and the door creaked open easily. She stood for a moment blind with light. 
They entered a large low room, walled with hewn stone and lighted by one fuming torch hung from 
a chain. The place was foul with the torch-smoke that had no outlet. Arha's eyes stung and watered. 
"Where are the prisoners?" 
"There." 
At last she realized that the three heaps of something on the far side of the room were men. 
"The door isn't locked. Is there no guard?" 
"None is needed." 
She went a little farther into the room, hesitant, peering through the smoky haze. The prisoners 
were manacled by both ankles and one wrist to great rings driven into the rock of the wall. If one of 

them wanted to lie down, his chained arm must remain raised, hanging from the manacle. Their hair and 
beards had made a matted tangle which, together with the shadows, hid their faces. One of them half lay, 
the other two sat or squatted. They were naked. The smell from them was stronger even than the reek of 
smoke. 
One of them seemed to be watching Arha; she thought she saw the glitter of eyes, then was not 
sure. The others had not moved or lifted their heads. 
She turned away. "They are not men any more," she said. 
"They were never men. They were demons, beast-spirits, who plotted against the sacred life of the 
Godking!" Kossil's eyes shone with the reddish torchlight. 
Arha looked again at the prisoners, awed and curious. "How could a man attack a god? How was it? 
You: how could you dare attack a living god?" 
The one man stared at her through the black brush of his hair, but said nothing. 
"Their tongues were cut out before they were sent from Awabath," Kossil said. "Do not speak to 
them, mistress. They are defilement. They are yours, but not to speak to, nor to look at, nor to think 
upon. They are yours to give to the Nameless Ones." 
"How are they to be sacrificed?" 
Arha no longer looked at the prisoners. She faced Kossil instead, drawing strength from the 
massive body, the cold voice. She felt dizzy, and the reek of smoke and filth made her sick, yet she 
seemed to think and speak with perfect calm. Had she not done this many times before? 
"The Priestess of the Tombs knows best what manner of death will please her Masters, and it is 
hers to choose. There are many ways." 
"Let Gobar the captain of the guards hew off their heads. And the blood will be poured out before 
the Throne." 
"As if it were a sacrifice of goats?" Kossil seemed to be sneering at her lack of imagination. She 
stood dumb. Kossil went on, "Besides, Gobar is a man. No man can enter the Dark Places of the Tombs, 
surely my mistress remembers that? If he enters, he does not leave..." 
"Who brought them here? Who feeds them?" 
"The wardens who serve my temple, Duby and Uahto; they are eunuchs and may enter here on the 
services of the Nameless Ones, as I may. The Godking's soldiers left the prisoners bound outside the 
wall, and I and the wardens brought them in through the Prisoner's Door, the door in the red rocks. So it 
is always done. The food and water is lowered from a trapdoor in one of the rooms behind the Throne." 
Arha looked up and saw, beside the chain from which the torch hung, a wooden square set into the 
stone ceiling. It was far too small for a man to crawl through, but a rope lowered from it would come 
down just within reach of the middle prisoner of the three. She looked away again quickly. 
"Let them not bring any more food or water, then. Let the torch go out." 
Kossil bowed. "And the bodies, when they die?" 
"Let Duby and Uahto bury them in the great cavern that we passed through, the Undertomb," the 
girl said, her voice becoming quick and high. "They must do it in the dark. My Masters will eat the 
bodies." 
"It shall be done." 
"Is this well, Kossil?" 
"It is well, mistress." 
"Then let us go," Arha said, very shrill. She turned and hurried back to the wooden door, and out of 

the Room of Chains into the blackness of the tunnel. It seemed sweet and peaceful as a starless night, 
silent, without sight, or light, or life. She plunged into the clean darkness, hurried forward through it like 
a swimmer through water. Kossil hastened along, behind her and getting farther behind, panting, 
lumbering. Without hesitation Arha repeated the missed and taken turnings as they had come, skirted the 
vast echoing Undertomb, and crept, bent over, up the last long tunnel to the shut door of rock. There she 
crouched down and felt for the long key on the ring at her waist. She found it, but could not find the 
keyhole. There was no pinprick of light in the invisible wall before her. Her fingers groped over it 
seeking lock or bolt or handle and finding nothing. Where must the key go? How could she get out? 
"Mistress!" 
Kossil's voice, magnified by echoes, hissed and boomed far behind her. 
"Mistress, the door will not open from inside. There is no way out. There is no return." 
Arha crouched against the rock. She said nothing. 
"Arha!" 
"I am here." 
"Come!" 
She came, crawling on hands and knees along the passage, like a dog, to Kossil's skirts. 
"To the right. Hurry! I must not linger here. It is not my place. Follow me." 
Arha got to her feet, and held onto Kossils robes. They went forward, following the strangely 
carven wall of the cavern to the right for a long way, then entering a black gap in the blackness. They 
went upward now, in tunnels, by stairs. The girl still clung to the woman's robe. Her eyes were shut. 
There was light, red through her eyelids. She thought it was the torchlit room full of smoke again, 
and did not open her eyes. But the air smelt sweetish, dry and moldy, a familiar smell; and her feet were 
on a staircase steep almost as a ladder. She let go Kossil's robe, and looked. A trapdoor was open over 
her head. She scrambled through it after Kossil. It let her into a room she knew, a little stone cell 
containing a couple of chests and iron boxes, in the warren of rooms behind the Throne Room of the 
Hall. Daylight glimmered gray and faint in the hallway outside its door. 
"The other, the Prisoner's Door, leads only into the tunnels. It does not lead out. This is the only 
way out. If there is any other way I do not know of it, nor does Thar. You must remember it for yourself, 
if there is one. But I do not think there is." Kossil still spoke in an undertone, and with a kind of 
spitefulness. Her heavy face within the black cowl was pale, and damp with sweat. 
"I don't remember the turnings to this way out." 
"I'll tell them to you. Once. You must remember them. Next time I will not come with you. This is 
not my place. You must come alone." 
The girl nodded. She looked up into the older woman's face, and thought how strange it looked, 
pale with scarcely mastered fear and yet triumphant, as if Kossil gloated over her weakness. 
"I will come alone after this," Arha said, and then trying to turn away from Kossil she felt her legs 
give way, and saw the room turn over. She fainted in a little black heap at the priestess' feet. 
"You'll learn," Kossil said, still breathing heavily, standing motionless. "You'll learn." 
------ 
Dreams and Tales 

------ 
Arha was not well for several days. They treated her for fever. She kept to her bed, or sat in the 
mild autumn sunlight on the porch of the Small House, and looked up at the western hills. She felt weak 
and stupid. The same ideas occurred to her again and again. She was ashamed of having fainted. No 
guard had been set upon the Tomb Wall, but now she would never dare ask Kossil about that. She did 
not want to see Kossil at all: never. It was because she was ashamed of having fainted. 
Often, in the sunlight, she would plan how she was going to behave next time she went into the 
dark places under the hill. She thought many times about what kind of death she should command for 
the next set of prisoners, more elaborate, better suited to the rituals of the Empty Throne. 
Each night, in the dark, she woke up screaming, "They aren't dead yet! They are still dying!" 
She dreamed a great deal. She dreamed that she had to cook food, great cauldrons full of savory 
porridge, and pour it all out into a hole in the ground. She dreamed that she had to carry a full bowl of 
water, a deep brass bowl, through the dark, to someone who was thirsty. She could never get to this 
person. She woke, and she herself was thirsty, but she did not go and get a drink. She lay awake, eyes 
open, in the room without windows. 
One morning Penthe came to see her. From the porch Arha saw her approach the Small House with 
a careless, purposeless air, as if she just happened to be wandering that way. If Arha had not spoken she 
would not have come up the steps. But Arha was lonely, and spoke. 
Penthe made the deep bow required of all who approached the Priestess of the Tombs, and then 
plopped down on the steps below Arha and made a noise like "Phewph!" She had gotten quite tall and 
plump; anything she did turned her cherry pink, and she was pink now from walking. 
"I heard you were ill. I saved you out some apples." She suddenly produced a rush net containing 
six or eight perfect yellow apples, from somewhere under her voluminous black robe. She was now 
consecrated to the service of the Godking, and served in his temple under Kossil; but she wasn't yet a 
priestess, and still did lessons and chores with the novices. "Poppe and I sorted the apples this year, and I 
saved the very best ones out. They always dry all the really good ones. Of course they keep best, but it 
seems such a waste. Aren't they pretty?" 
Arha felt the pale gold satin skins of the apples, looked at the twigs to which brown leaves still 
delicately clung. "They are pretty." 
"Have one," said Penthe. 
"Not now. You do." 
Penthe selected the smallest, out of politeness, and ate it in about ten juicy, skillful, interested bites. 
"I could eat all day," she said. "I never get enough. I wish I could be a cook instead of a priestess. 
I'd cook better than that old skinflint Nathabba, and besides, I'd get to lick the pots... Oh, did you hear 
about Munith? She was supposed to be polishing those brass pots they keep the rose oil in, you know, 
those long thin sort of jars with stoppers. And she thought she was supposed to clean the insides too, so 
she stuck her hand in, with a rag around it, you know, and then she couldn't get it out. She tried so hard 
it got all puffed up and swollen at the wrist, you know, so that she really was stuck. And she went 
galloping all over the dormitories yelling, `I can't get it off! I can't get it off!' And Punti's so deaf now he 
thought it was a fire, and started screeching at the other wardens to come and rescue the novices. And 
Uahto was milking and came running out of the pen to see what was the matter, and left the gate open, 
and all the milch-goats got out and came charging into the courtyard and ran into Punti and the wardens 

and the little girls, and Munith waving this brass pot around on the end of her arm and having hysterics, 
and they were all sort of rushing around down there when Kossil came down from the temple. And she 
said, `What's this? What's this?"' 
Penthe's fair, round face took on a repulsive sneer, not at all like Kossil's cold expression, and yet 
somehow so like Kossil that Arha gave a snort of almost terrified laughter. 
"'What's this? What's all this?' Kossil said. And then-and then the brown goat butted her-" Penthe 
dissolved in laughter, tears welled in her eyes. "And M-Munith hit the, the goat with the p-ppot" 
Both girls rocked back and forth in spasms of giggling, holding their knees, choking. 
"And Kossil turned around and said, `What's this? What's this?' to the - to the - to the goat..." The 
end of the tale was lost in laughter. Penthe finally wiped her eyes and nose, and absentmindedly started 
on another apple. 
To laugh so hard made Arha feel a little shaky. She calmed herself down, and after a while asked, 
"How did you come here, Penthe?" 
"Oh, I was the sixth girl my mother and father had, and they just couldn't bring up so many and 
marry them all off. So when I was seven they brought me to the Godking's temple and dedicated me. 
That was in Ossawa. They had too many novices there, I guess, because pretty soon they sent me on 
here. Or maybe they thought I'd make a specially good priestess or something. But they were wrong 
about that!" Penthe bit her apple with a cheerful, rueful face. 
"Would you rather not have been a priestess?" 
"Would I rather! Of course! I'd rather marry a pigherd and live in a ditch. I'd rather anything than 
stay buried alive here all my born days with a mess of women in a perishing old desert where nobody 
ever comes! But there's no good wishing about it, because I've been consecrated now and I'm stuck with 
it. But I do hope that in my next life I'm a dancing-girl in Awabath! Because I will have earned it." 
Arha looked down at her with a dark steady gaze. She did not understand. She felt that she had 
never seen Penthe before, never looked at her and seen her, round and full of life and juice as one of her 
golden apples, beautiful to see. 
"Doesn't the Temple mean anything to you?" she asked, rather harshly. 
Penthe, always submissive and easily bullied, did not take alarm this time. "Oh, I know your 
Masters are very important to you," she said with an indifference that shocked Arha. "That makes some 
sense, anyhow, because you're their one special servant. You weren't just consecrated, you were 
specially born. But look at me. Am I supposed to feel so much awe and so on about the Godking? After 
all he's just a man, even if he does live in Awabath in a palace ten miles around with gold roofs. He's 
about fifty years old, and he's bald. You can see in all the statues. And I'll bet you he has to cut his 
toenails, just like any other man. I know perfectly well that he's a god, too. But what I think is, he'll be 
much godlier after he's dead." 
Arha agreed with Penthe, for secretly she had come to consider the self-styled Divine Emperors of 
Kargad as upstarts, false gods trying to filch the worship due to the true and everlasting Powers. But 
there was something underneath Penthe's words with which she didn't agree, something wholly new to 
her, frightening to her. She had not realized how very different people were, how differently they saw 
life. She felt as if she had looked up and suddenly seen a whole new planet hanging huge and populous 
right outside the window, an entirely strange world, one in which the gods did not matter. She was 
scared by the solidity of Penthe's unfaith. Scared, she struck out. 
"That's true. My Masters have been dead a long, long time; and they were never men... Do you 

know, Penthe, I could call you into the service of the Tombs." She spoke pleasantly, as if offering her 
friend a better choice. 
The pink went right out of Penthe's cheeks. 
"Yes," she said, "you could. But I'm not... I'm not the sort that would be good at that." 
"Why?" 
"I am afraid of the dark," Penthe said in a low voice. 
Arha made a little sound of scorn, but she was pleased. She had made her point. Penthe might 
disbelieve in the gods, but she feared the unnameable powers of the dark - as did every mortal soul. 
"I wouldn't do that unless you wanted to, you know," Arha said. 
A long silence fell between their. 
"You're getting to be more and more like Thar," Penthe said in her soft dreamy way. "Thank 
goodness you're not getting like Kossil! But you're so strong. I wish I were strong. I just like eating..." 
"Go ahead," Arha said, superior and amused, and Penthe slowly consumed a third apple down to 
the seeds. 
The demands of the endless ritual of the Place brought Arha out of her privacy a couple of days 
later. Twin kids had been born out of season to a she-goat, and were to be sacrificed to the Twin God- 
Brothers as the custom was: an important rite, at which the First Priestess must be present. Then it was 
dark of the moon, and the ceremonies of the darkness must be performed before the Empty Throne. Arha 
breathed in the drugging fumes of herbs burning in broad trays of bronze before the Throne, and danced, 
solitary in black. She danced for the unseen spirits of the dead and the unborn and as she danced the 
spirits crowded the air around her, following the turn and spin of her feet and the slow, sure gestures of 
her arms. She sang the songs whose words no man understood, which she had learned syllable by 
syllable, long ago, from Thar. A choir of priestesses hidden in the dusk behind the great double row of 
columns echoed the strange words after her, and the air in the vast ruinous room hummed with voices, as 
if the crowding spirits repeated the chants again and again. 
The Godking in Awabath sent no more prisoners to the Place, and gradually Arha ceased to dream 
of the three now long since dead and buried in shallow graves in the great cavern under the Tombstones. 
She summoned up her courage to return to that cavern. She must go back there: the Priestess of the 
Tombs must be able to enter her own domain without terror, to know its ways. 
The first time she entered the trapdoor was hard; yet not so hard as she had feared. She had 
schooled herself up to it so well, had so determined that she would go alone and keep her nerve, that 
when she came there she was almost dismayed to find that there was nothing to be afraid of. Graves 
might be there, but she could not see them; she could not see anything. It was black; it was silent. And 
that was all. 
Day after day she went there, always entering by the trapdoor in the room behind the Throne, until 
she knew well the whole circuit of the cavern, with its strange sculptured walls -as well as one can know 
what one cannot see. She never left the walls, for in striking out across the great hollow she might soon 
lose the sense of direction in the darkness, and so, blundering back at last to the wall, not know where 
she was. For as she had learned the first time, the important thing down in the dark places was to know 
which turnings and openings one had passed, and which were to come. It must be done by counting, for 
they were all alike to the groping hands. Arha's memory had been well trained, and she found no 
difficulty to this odd trick of finding one's way by touch and number, instead of by sight and common 

sense. She soon knew by heart all the corridors that opened off the Undertomb, the lesser maze that lay 
under the Hall of the Throne and the hilltop. But there was one corridor she never entered: the second 
left of the red rock entrance, that one which, if she entered mistaking it for one she knew, she might 
never find her way out of again. Her longing to enter it, to learn the Labyrinth, grew steadily, but she 
restrained it until she had learned all she could about it, aboveground. 
Thar knew little about it but the names of certain of its rooms, and the list of directions, of turns 
made and missed, for getting to these rooms. She would tell these to Arha, but she would never draw 
them in the dust or even with the gesture of a hand in the air; and she herself had never followed them, 
had never entered the Labyrinth. But when Arha asked her, "What is the way from the iron door that 
stands open to the Painted Room?" or, "How does the way run from the Room of Bones to the tunnel by 
the river?" then Thar would be silent a little, and then recite the strange directions she had learned long 
before from Arha-that-was: so many crossings passed, so many left-hand turns taken, and so on, and so 
on. And all these Arha got by heart, as Thar had, often on the first listening. When she lay in bed nights 
she would repeat them to herself, trying to imagine the places, the rooms, the turnings. 
Thar showed Arha the many spy holes that opened into the maze, in every building and temple of 
the Place, and even under rocks out of doors. The spiderweb of stone-walled tunnels underlay all the 
Place and even beyond its walls; there were miles of tunnels, down there in the dark. No person there but 
she, the two High Priestesses, and their special servants, the eunuchs Manan, Uahto, and Duby, knew of 
the existence of this maze that lay beneath every step they took. There were vague rumors of it among 
the others; they all knew that there were caves or rooms of some sort under the Tombstones. But none of 
them was very curious about anything to do with the Nameless Ones and the places sacred to them. 
Perhaps they felt that the less they knew, the better. Arha of course bad been intensely curious, and 
knowing that there were spy holes into the Labyrinth, had sought for them; yet they were so well 
concealed, in the pavements of the floors or in the desert ground, that she had never found one, not even 
the one in her own Small House, until Thar showed it to her. 
One night in early spring she took a candle lantern and went down with it, unlit, through the 
Undertomb to the second passage to the left of the passage from the red rock door. 
In the dark, she went some thirty paces down the passage, and then passed through a doorway, 
feeling the iron frame set in the rock: the limit, until now, of her explorations. Past the Iron Door she 
went a long way along the tunnel, and when at last it began to curve to the right, she lit her candle and 
looked about her. For light was permitted, here. She was no longer in the Undertomb. She was in a place 
less sacred though perhaps more dreadful. She was in the Labyrinth. 
The raw, blank walls and vault and floor of rock surrounded her in the small sphere of candlelight. 
The air was dead. Before her and behind her the tunnel stretched off into darkness. 
All the tunnels were the same, crossing and recrossing. She kept careful count of her turnings and 
gassings, and recited Thar's directions to herself, though she knew them perfectly. For it would not do to 
get lost in the Labyrinth. In the Undertomb and the short passages around it, Kossil or Thar might find 
her, or Manan come seeking for her, for she had taken him there several times. Here, none of them had 
ever been: only she herself. Little good it would do her if they came to the Undertomb and called aloud, 
and she was lost in some spiraling tangle of tunnels half a mile away. She imagined how she might hear 
the echo of voices calling her, echoing down every corridor, and she would try to come to them, but, 
lost, would only become farther lost. So vividly did she imagine this that she stopped, thinking she heard 
a distant voice calling. But there was nothing. And she would not get lost. She was very careful; and this 

was her place, her own domain. The powers of the dark, the Nameless Ones, would guide her steps here, 
just as they would lead astray any other mortal who dared enter the Labyrinth of the Tombs. 
She did not go far into it that first time, but far enough that the strange, bitter, yet pleasurable 
certainty of her utter solitude and independence there grew strong in her, and led her back, and back 
again, and each time farther. She came to the Painted Room, and the Six Ways, and followed the long 
Outmost Tunnel, and penetrated the strange tangle that led to the Room of Bones. 
"When was the Labyrinth made?" she asked Thar, and the stern, thin priestess answered, "Mistress, 
I do not know. No one knows." 
"Why was it made?" 
"For the hiding away of the treasures of the Tombs, and for the punishment of those who tried to 
steal those treasures." 
"All the treasures I've seen are in the rooms behind the Throne, and the basements under it. What 
lies in the Labyrinth?" 
"A far greater and more ancient treasure. Would you look on it?" 
"Yes." 
"None but you may enter the Treasury of the Tombs. You may take your servants into the 
Labyrinth, but not into the Treasury. If even Manan entered there, the anger of the dark would waken; he 
would not leave the Labyrinth alive. There you must go alone, forever. I know where the Great Treasure 
is. You told me the way, fifteen years ago, before you died, so that I would remember and tell you when 
you returned. I can tell you the way to follow in the Labyrinth, beyond the Painted Room; and the key to 
the treasury is that silver one on your ring, with a figure of a dragon on the haft. But you must go alone." 
"Tell me the way." 
Thar told her, and she remembered, as she remembered all that was told her. But she did not go to 
see the Great Treasure of the Tombs. Some feeling that her will or her knowledge was not yet complete 
held her back. Or perhaps she wanted to keep something in reserve, something to look forward to, that 
cast a glamor over those endless tunnels through the dark that ended always in blank walls or bare dusty 
cells. She would wait awhile before she saw her treasures. 
After all, had she not seen them before? 
It still made her feel strange when Thar and Kossil spoke to her of things she had seen or said 
before she died. She knew that indeed she had died, and had been reborn in a new body at the hour of 
her old body's death: not only once, fifteen years ago, but fifty years ago, and before that, and before 
that, back down the years and hundreds of years, generation before generation, to the very beginning of 
years when the Labyrinth was dug, and the Stones were raised, and the First Priestess of the Nameless 
Ones lived in this Place and danced before the Empty Throne. They were all one, all those lives and 
hers. She was the First Priestess. All human beings were forever reborn, but only she, Arha, was reborn 
forever as herself. A hundred times she had learned the ways and turnings of the Labyrinth and had 
come to the hidden room at last. 
Sometimes she thought she remembered. The dark places under the hill were so familiar to her, as 
if they were not only her domain, but her home. When she breathed in the drug-fumes to dance at dark 
of the moon, her head grew light and her body was no longer hers; then she danced across the centuries, 
barefoot in black robes, and knew that the dance had never ceased. 
Yet it was always strange when Thar said, "You told me before you died..." 
Once she asked, "Who were those men that came to rob the Tombs? Did any ever do so?" The idea 

of robbers had struck her as exciting, but improbable. How would they come secretly to the Place? 
Pilgrims were very few, fewer even than prisoners. Now and then new novices or slaves were sent from 
lesser temples of the Four Lands, or a small group came to bring some offering of gold or rare incense to 
one of the temples. And that was all. Nobody came by chance, or to buy and sell, or to sightsee, or to 
steal; nobody came but under orders. Arha did not even know how far it was to the nearest town, twenty 
miles or more; and the nearest town was a small one. The Place was guarded and defended by 
emptiness, by solitude. Anybody crossing the desert that surrounded it, she thought, would have as much 
chance of going unseen as a black sheep in a snowfield. 
She was with Thar and Kossil, with whom much of her time was spent now when she was not in 
the Small House or alone under the hill. It was a stormy, cold night in April. They sat by a tiny fire of 
sage on the hearth in the room behind the Godking's temple, Kossil's room. Outside the doorway, in the 
hall, Manan and Duby played a game with sticks and counters, tossing a bundle of sticks and catching as 
many as possible on the back of the hand. Manan and Arha still sometimes played that game, in secret, 
in the inner courtyard of the Small House. The rattle of dropped sticks, the husky mumbles of triumph 
and defeat, the small crackle of the fire, were the only sounds when the three priestesses fell silent. All 
around beyond the walls reached the profound silence of the desert night. From time to time came the 
patter of a sparse, hard shower of rain. 
"Many came to rob the Tombs, long ago; but none ever did so," said Thar. Taciturn as she was, she 
liked now and then to tell a story, and often did so as part of Arha's instruction. She looked tonight as if 
a story might be gotten out of her. 
"How would any man dare?" 
"They would dare," Kossil said. "They were sorcerers, wizardfolk from the Inner Lands. That was 
before the Godkings ruled the Kargad Lands; we were not so strong then. The wizards used to sail from 
the west to Karego-At and Atuan to plunder the towns on the coast, loot the farms, even come into the 
Sacred City Awabath. They came to kill dragons, they said, but they stayed to rob towns and temples." 
"And their great heroes would come among us to test their swords," Thar said, "and work their 
ungodly spells. One of them, a mighty sorcerer and dragonlord, the greatest of them all, came to grief 
here. It was long ago, very long ago, but the tale is still remembered, and not only in this place. The 
sorcerer was named Erreth-Akbe, and he was both king and wizard in the West. He came to our lands, 
and in Awabath he joined with certain Kargish rebel lords, and fought for the rule of the city with the 
High Priest of the Inmost Temple of the Twin Gods. Long they fought, the man's sorcery against the 
lightning of the gods, and the temple was destroyed around them. At last the High Priest broke the 
sorcerer's witching-staff, broke in half his amulet of power, and defeated him. He escaped from the city 
and from the Kargish lands, and fled clear across Earthsea to the farthest west; and there a dragon slew 
him, because his power was gone. And since that day the power and might of the Inner Lands has ever 
waned. Now the High Priest was named Intathin, and he was the first of the house of Tarb, that lineage 
from which, after the fulfillment of the prophecies and the centuries, the Priest-Kings of Karego-At were 
descended, and from them, the Godkings of all Kargad. So it is that since the day of Intathin the power 
and might of the Kargish lands has ever grown. Those who came to rob the Tombs, they were sorcerers, 
trying and trying to get back the broken amulet of Erreth-Akbe. But it is still here, where the High Priest 
put it for safekeeping. And so are their bones..." Thar pointed at the ground under her feet. 
"Half of it is here," Kossil said. 
"And the other half lost forever." 

 "How lost?" asked Arha. 
"The one half, in Intathin's hand, was given by him to the Treasury of the Tombs, where it should 
lie safe forever. The other remained in the sorcerer's hand, but he gave it before he fled to a petty king, 
one of the rebels, named Thoreg of Hupun. I do not know why he did so." 
"To cause strife, to make Thoreg proud," Kossil said. "And so it did. The descendants of Thoreg 
rebelled again when the house of Tarb ruled; and yet again they took arms against the first Godking, 
refusing to acknowledge him as either king or god. They were an accursed, ensorcelled race. They are 
all dead now." 
Thar nodded. "The father of our present Godking, the Lord Who Has Arisen, put down that family 
of Hupun, and destroyed their palaces. When that was done, the half-amulet, which they had kept ever 
since the days of Erreth-Akbe and Intathin, was lost. No one knows what became of it. And that was a 
lifetime ago." 
"It was thrown out as trash, no doubt," Kossil said. "They say it doesn't look like anything of value, 
the Ring of Erreth-Akbe. A curse upon it and upon all the things of the wizardfolk!" Kossil spat into the 
fire. 
"Have you seen the half that is here?" Arha asked of Thar. 
The thin woman shook her head. "It is in that treasury to which none may come but the One 
Priestess. It may be the greatest of all the treasures there; I do not know. I think perhaps it is. For 
hundreds of years the Inner Lands sent thieves and wizards here to try to steal it back, and they would 
pass by open coffers of gold, seeking that one thing. It is very long since Erreth-Akbe and Intathin lived, 
and yet still the story is known and told, both here and in the West. Most things grow old and perish, as 
the centuries go on and on. Very few are the precious things that remain precious, or the tales that are 
still told." 
Arha brooded awhile and said, "They must have been very brave men, or very stupid, to enter the 
Tombs. Don't they know the powers of the Nameless Ones?" 
"No," Kossil said in her cold voice. "They have no gods. They work magic, and think they are gods 
themselves. But they are not. And when they die, they are not reborn. They become dust and bone, and 
their ghosts whine on the wind a little while till the wind blows them away. They do not have immortal 
souls." 
"But what is this magic they work?" Arha asked, enthralled. She did not remember having said 
once that she would have turned away and refused to look at the ships from the Inner Lands. "How do 
they do it? What does it do?" 
"Tricks, deceptions, jugglery," Kossil said. 
"Somewhat more," said Thar, "if the tales be true even in part. The wizards of the West can raise 
and still the winds, and make them blow whither they will. On that, all agree, and tell the same tale. That 
is why they are great sailors; they can put the wind of magic in their sails, and go where they will, and 
hush the storms at sea. And it is said that they can make light at will, and darkness; and change rocks to 
diamonds, and lead to gold; that they can build a great palace or a whole city in one instant, at least in 
seeming; that they can turn themselves into bears, or fish, or dragons, just as they please." 
"I do not believe all that," said Kossil. "That they are dangerous, subtle with trickery, slippery as 
eels, yes. But they say that if you take his wooden staff away from a sorcerer, he has no power left. 
Probably there are evil runes written on the staff." 
Thar shook her head again. "They carry a staff, indeed, but it is only a tool for the power they bear 

within them." 
"But how do they get the power?" Arha asked. "Where does it come from?" 
"Lies," Kossil said. 
"Words," said Thar. "So I was told by one who once had watched a great sorcerer of the Inner 
Lands, a Mage as they are called. They had taken him prisoner, raiding to the West. He showed them a 
stick of dry wood, and spoke a word to it. And lo! it blossomed. And he spoke another word, and lo! it 
bore red apples. And he spoke one word more, and stick, blossoms, apples, and all vanished, and with 
them the sorcerer. With one word he had gone as a rainbow goes, like a wink, without a trace; and they 
never found him on that isle. Was that mere jugglery?" 
"It's easy to fool fools," Kossil said. 
Thar said no more, avoiding argument but Arha was loath to have the subject dropped. "What do 
the wizard-folk look like," she asked, "are they truly black all over, with white eyes?" 
"They are black and vile. I have never seen one," Kossil said with satisfaction, shifting her heavy 
bulk on the low stool and spreading her hands to the fire. 
"May the Twin Gods keep them afar," Thar muttered. 
"They will never come here again," said Kossil. And the fire sputtered, and the rain spattered on the 
roof, and outside the gloomy doorway Manan cried shrilly, "Aha! A half for me, a half!" 
------ 
Light Under the Hill 
------ 
As the year was rounding again towards winter, Thar died. In the summer a wasting disease had 
come upon her; she who had been thin grew skeletal, she who had been grim now did not speak at all. 
Only to Arha would she talk, sometimes, when they were alone together; then even that ceased, and she 
went silently into the dark. When she was gone, Arha missed her sorely. If Thar had been stern, she had 
never been cruel. It was pride she had taught to Arha, not fear. 
Now there was only Kossil. 
A new High Priestess for the Temple of the Twin Gods would come in spring from Awabath; until 
then, Arha and Kossil between them were the rulers of the Place. The woman called the girl "mistress," 
and should obey her if commanded. But Arha learned not to command Kossil. She had the right to do so, 
but not the strength; it would take very great strength to stand up against Kossil's jealousy of a higher 
status than her own, her hatred of anything she herself did not control. 
Since Arha had learned (from gentle Penthe) of the existence of unfaith, and had accepted it as a 
reality even though it frightened her, she had been able to look at Kossil much more steadily, and to 
understand her. Kossil had no true worship in her heart of the Nameless Ones or of the gods. She held 
nothing sacred but power. The Emperor of the Kargad Lands now held the power, and therefore he was 
indeed a godking in her eyes, and she would serve him well. But to her the temples were mere show, the 
Tombstones were rocks, the Tombs of Atuan were dark holes in the ground, terrible but empty. She 
would do away with the worship of the Empty Throne, if she could. She would do away with the First 
Priestess, if she dared. 

 Arha had come to face even this last fact quite steadily. Perhaps Thar had helped her to see it, 
though she had never said anything directly. In the first stages of her illness, before the silence came 
upon her, she had asked Arha to come to her every few days, and had talked to her, telling her much 
about the doings of the Godking and his predecessor, and the ways of Awabath - matters which she 
should as an important priestess know, but which were not often flattering to the Godking and his court. 
And she had spoken of her own life, and described what the Arha of the previous life had looked like 
and done; and sometimes, not often, she had mentioned what might be the difficulties and dangers of 
Arha's present life. Not once did she mention Kossil by name. But Arha had been Thar's pupil for eleven 
years, and needed no more than a hint or a tone to understand, and to remember. 
After the gloomy commotion of the Rites of Mourning was over, Arha took to avoiding Kossil. 
When the long works and rituals of the day were done, she went to her solitary dwelling; and whenever 
there was time, she went to the room behind the Throne, and opened the trapdoor, and went down into 
the dark. In daytime and nighttime, for it made no difference there, she pursued a systematic exploration 
of her domain. The Undertomb, with its great weight of sacredness, was utterly forbidden to any but 
priestesses and their most trusted eunuchs. Any other, man or woman, who ventured there would 
certainly be struck dead by the wrath of the Nameless Ones. But among all the rules she had learned, 
there was no rule forbidding entry to the Labyrinth. There was no need. It could be entered only from the 
Undertomb; and anyway, do flies need rules to tell them not to enter in a spider's web? 
So she took Manan often into the nearer regions of the Labyrinth, that he might learn the ways. He 
was not at all eager to go there, but as always he obeyed her. She made sure that Duby and Uahto, 
Kossil's eunuchs, knew the way to the Room of Chains and the way out of the Undertomb, but no more; 
she never took them into the Labyrinth. She wanted no one but Manan, utterly faithful to her, to know 
those secret ways. For they were hers, hers alone, forever. She had begun her full exploration with the 
Labyrinth. All the autumn she spent many days walking those endless corridors, and still there were 
regions of them she had never come to. There was a weariness in that tracing of the vast, meaningless 
web of ways; the legs got tired and the mind got bored, forever reckoning up the turnings and the 
passages behind and to come. It was wonderful, laid out in the solid rock underground like the streets of 
a great city; but it had been made to weary and confuse the mortal walking in it, and even its priestess 
must feel it to be nothing, in the end, but a great trap. 
So, more and more as winter deepened, she turned her thorough exploration to the Hall itself, the 
altars, the alcoves behind and beneath the altars, the rooms of chests and boxes, the contents of the 
chests and boxes, the passages and attics, the dusty hollow under the dome where hundreds of bats 
nested, the basements and underbasements that were the anterooms of the corridors of darkness. 
Her hands and sleeves perfumed with the dry sweetness of a musk that had fallen to powder lying 
for eight centuries in an iron chest, her brow smeared with the clinging black of cobweb, she would 
kneel for an hour to study the carvings on a beautiful, time-ruined coffer of cedar wood, the gift of some 
king ages since to the Nameless Powers of the Tombs. There was the king, a tiny stiff figure with a big 
nose, and there was the Hall of the Throne with its flat dome and porch columns, carved in delicate relief 
on the wood by some artist who had been dust for how many hundred years. There was the One 
Priestess, breathing in the drug-fumes from the trays of bronze and prophesying or advising the king, 
whose nose was broken off in this frame; the face of the Priestess was too small to have clear features, 
yet Arha would imagine that the face was her own face. She wondered what she had told the king with 
the big nose, and whether he had been grateful. 

 She had favorite places in the Hall of the Throne, as one might have favorite spots to sit in a sunny 
house. She often went to a little half-loft over one of the robing rooms in the hinder part of the Hall. 
There ancient gowns and costumes were kept, left from the days when great kings and lords came to 
worship at the Place of the Tombs of Atuan, acknowledging a domain greater than their own or any 
man's. Sometimes their daughters, the princesses, had put on these soft white silks, embroidered with 
topaz and dark amethyst, and had danced with the Priestess of the Tombs. There were little painted ivory 
tables in one of the treasuries, showing such a dance, and the lords and kings waiting outside the Hall, 
for then as now no man ever set foot on the ground of the Tombs. But the maidens might come in, and 
dance with the Priestess, in white silk. The Priestess herself wore rough cloth, homespun black, always, 
then and now; but she liked to come and finger the sweet, soft stuff, rotten with age, the unperishing 
jewels tearing from the cloth by their own slight weight. There was a scent in these chests different from 
all the musks and incenses of the temples of the Place: a fresher scent, fainter, younger. 
In the treasure rooms she would spend a night learning the contents of a single chest, jewel by 
jewel, the rusted armor, the broken plumes of helms, the buckles and pins and brooches, bronze, silvergilt, 
and solid gold. 
Owls, undisturbed by her presence, sat on the rafters and opened and shut their yellow eyes. A bit 
of starlight shone in between tiles of the roof; or the snow came sifting down, fine and cold as those 
ancient silks that fell to nothing at hand's touch. 
One night late in the winter, it was too cold in the Hall. She went to the trapdoor, raised it, swung 
down onto the steps, and closed it above her. She set off silently on the way she now knew so well, the 
passage to the Undertomb. There, of course, she never bore a light; if she carried a lantern, from going in 
the Labyrinth or in the dark of night above ground, she extinguished it before she came near the 
Undertomb. She had never seen that place, never in all the generations of her priestesshood. In the 
passage now, she blew out the candle in the lamp she carried, and without slowing her pace at all went 
forward in the pitch dark, easy as a little fish in dark water. Here, winter or summer, there was no cold, 
no heat: always the same even chill, a little damp, changeless. Up above, the great frozen winds of 
winter whipped thin snow over the desert. Here there was no wind, no season; it was close, it was still, it 
was safe. 
She was going to the Painted Room. She liked sometimes to go there and study the strange wall 
drawings that leapt out of the dark at the gleam of her candle: men with long wings and great eyes, 
serene and morose. No one could tell her what they were, there were no such paintings elsewhere in the 
Place, but she thought she knew; they were the spirits of the damned, who are not reborn. The Painted 
Room was in the Labyrinth, so she must pass through the cavern beneath the Tombstones first. As she 
approached it down the slanting passage, a faint gray bloomed, a bare hint and glimmer, the echo of an 
echo of a distant light. 
She thought her eyes were tricking her, as they often did in that utter blackness. She closed them, 
and the glimmering vanished. She opened them, and it reappeared. 
She had stopped and was standing still. Gray, not black. A dull edge of pallor, just visible, where 
nothing could be visible, where all must be black. 
She took a few steps forward and put out her hand to that angle of the tunnel wall; and, infinitely 
faint, saw the movement of her hand. 
She went on. This was strange beyond thought, beyond fear, this faint blooming of light where no 
light had ever been, in the inmost grave of darkness. She went noiseless on bare feet, blackclothed. At 

the last turn of the corridor she halted; then very slowly took the last step, and looked, and saw. 
-Saw what she had never seen, not though she had lived a hundred lives: the great vaulted cavern 
beneath the Tombstones, not hollowed by man's hand but by the powers of the Earth. It was jeweled 
with crystals and ornamented with pinnacles and filigrees of white limestone where the waters under 
earth had worked, eons since: immense, with glittering roof and walls, sparkling, delicate, intricate, a 
palace of diamonds, a house of amethyst and crystal, from which the ancient darkness had been driven 
out by glory. 
Not bright, but dazzling to the dark-accustomed eye, was the light that worked this wonder. It was a 
soft gleam, like marshlight, that moved slowly across the cavern, striking a thousand scintillations from 
the jeweled roof and shifting a thousand fantastic shadows along the carven walls. 
The light burned at the end of a staff of wood, smokeless, unconsuming. The staff was held by a 
human hand. Arha saw the face beside the light; the dark face: the face of a man. 
She did not move. 
For a long time he crossed and recrossed the vast cave. He moved as if he sought something, 
looking behind the lacy cataracts of stone, studying the several corridors that led out of the Undertomb, 
yet not entering them. And still the Priestess of the Tombs stood motionless, in the black angle of the 
passage, waiting. 
What was hardest for her to think, perhaps, was that she was looking at a stranger. She had very 
seldom seen a stranger. It seemed to her that this must be one of the wardens - no, one of the men from 
over the wall, a goatherd or guard, a slave of the Place; and he had come to see the secrets of the 
Nameless Ones, maybe to steal something from the Tombs... 
To steal something. To rob the Dark Powers. Sacrilege: the word came slowly into Arha's mind. 
This was a man, and no man's foot must ever touch the soil of the Tombs, the Holy Place. Yet he had 
come here into the hollow place that was the heart of the Tombs. He had entered in. He had made light 
where light was forbidden, where it had never been since world's beginning. Why did the Nameless 
Ones not strike him down? 
He was standing now looking down at the rocky floor, which was cut and troubled. One could see 
that it had been opened and reclosed. The sour sterile clods dug up for the graves had not all been 
stamped down again. 
Her Masters had eaten those three. Why did they not eat this one? What were they waiting for? 
For their hands to act, for their tongue to speak... 
"Go! Go! Begone!" she screamed all at once at the top of her voice. Great echoes shrilled and 
boomed across the cavern, seeming to blur the dark, startled face that turned towards her, and, for one 
moment, across the shaken splendor of the cavern, saw her. Then the light was gone. All splendor gone. 
Blind dark, and silence. 
Now she could think again. She was released from the spell of light. 
He must have come in by the red rock door, the Prisoners' Door, so he would try to escape by it. 
Light and silent as the soft-winged owls she ran the half-circuit of the cavern to the low tunnel that led to 
the door which opened only inwards. She stooped there at the entrance of the tunnel. There was no draft 
of wind from outside; he had not left the door fixed open behind him. It was shut, and if he was in the 
tunnel, he was trapped there. 
But he was not in the tunnel. She was sure of it. So close, in that cramped place, she would have 
heard his breath, felt the warmth and pulse of his life itself. There was no one in the tunnel. She stood 

erect, and listened. Where had he gone? 
The darkness pressed like a bandage on her eyes. To have seen the Undertomb confused her; she 
was bewildered. She had known it only as a region defined by hearing, by hand's touch, by drifts of cool 
air in the dark; a vastness; a mystery, never to be seen. She had seen it, and the mystery had given place, 
not to horror, but to beauty, a mystery deeper even than that of the dark. 
She went slowly forward now, unsure. She felt her way to the left, to the second passageway, the 
one that led into the Labyrinth. There she paused and listened. 
Her ears told her no more than her eyes. But, as she stood with one hand on either side of the rock 
archway, she felt a faint, obscure vibration in the rock, and on the chill, stale air was the trace of a scent 
that did not belong there: the smell of the wild sage that grew on the desert hills, overhead, under the 
open sky. 
Slow and quiet she moved down the corridor, following her nose. 
After perhaps a hundred paces she heard him. He was almost as silent as she, but he was not so 
surefooted in the dark. She heard a slight scuffle, as if he bad stumbled on the uneven floor and 
recovered himself at once. Nothing else. She waited awhile and then went slowly on, touching her right 
hand fingertips very lightly to the wall. At last a rounded bar of metal came under them. There she 
stopped, and felt up the strip of iron until, almost as high as she could reach, she touched a projecting 
handle of rough iron. This, suddenly, with all her strength, she dragged downward. 
There was a fearful grinding and a clash. Blue sparks leapt out in a falling shower. Echoes died 
away, quarreling, down the corridor behind her. She put out her hands and felt, only a few inches before 
her face, the pocked surface of an iron door. 
She drew a long breath. 
Returning slowly up the tunnel to the Undertomb, and keeping its wall to her right, she went on to 
the trapdoor in the Hall of the Throne. She did not hasten, and went silently, though there was no need 
for silence any more. She had caught her thief. The door that he had gone through was the only way into 
or out of the Labyrinth; and it could be opened only from the outer side. 
He was down there now, in the darkness underground, and he would never come out again. 
Walking slowly and erect, she went past the Throne into the long columned hall. There, where one 
bronze bowl on the high tripod brimmed with the red glow of charcoal, she turned and approached the 
seven steps that led up to the Throne. 
On the lowest step she knelt, and bowed her forehead down to the cold, dusty stone, littered with 
mouse bones dropped by the hunting owls. 
"Forgive me that I have seen Your darkness broken," she said, not speaking the words aloud. 
"Forgive me that I have seen Your tombs violated. You will be avenged. O my Masters, death will 
deliver him to you, and he will never be reborn!" 
Yet even as she prayed, in her mind's eye she saw the quivering radiance of the lighted cavern, life 
in the place of death; and instead of terror at the sacrilege and rage against the thief, she thought only 
how strange it was, how strange... 
"What must I tell Kossil?" she asked herself as she came out into the blast of the winter wind and 
drew her cloak about her. "Nothing. Not yet. I am mistress of the Labyrinth. This is no business of the 
Godking's. I'll tell her after the thief is dead, perhaps. How must I kill him? I should make Kossil come 
and watch him die. She's fond of death. What is it he was seeking? He must be mad. How did he get in? 
Kossil and I have the only keys to the red rock door and the trapdoor. He must have come by the red 

rock door. Only a sorcerer could open it. A sorcerer-" 
She halted, though the wind almost buffeted her off her feet. 
"He is a sorcerer, a wizard of the Inner Lands, seeking the amulet of Erreth-Akbe." 
And there was such an outrageous glamor in this, that she grew warm all over, even in that icy 
wind, and laughed out loud. All around her the Place, and the desert around it, was black and silent; the 
wind keened; there were no lights down in the Big House. Thin, invisible snow flicked past on the wind. 
"If he opened the red rock door with sorcery, he can open others. He can escape." 
This thought chilled her for a moment, but it did not convince her. The Nameless Ones had let him 
enter. Why not? He could not do any harm. What harm is a thief who can't leave the scene of his theft? 
Spells and black powers he must have, and strong ones no doubt, since he had got that far; but he would 
not get farther. No spell cast by mortal man could be stronger than the will of the Nameless Ones, the 
presences in the Tombs, the Kings whose Throne was empty. 
To reassure herself of this, she hastened on down to the Small House. Manan was asleep on the 
porch, rolled up in his cloak and the ratty fur blanket that was his winter bed. She entered quietly, so as 
not to awaken him, and without lighting any lamp. She opened a little locked room, a mere closet at the 
end of the hall. She struck a flint spark long enough to find a certain place on the floor, and kneeling, 
pried up one tile. A bit of heavy, dirty cloth, only a few inches square, was revealed to her touch. This 
she slipped aside noiselessly. She started back, for a ray of light shot upward, straight into her face. 
After a moment, very cautiously, she looked into the opening. She had forgotten that he carried that 
queer light on his staff. She had been expecting at most to hear him, down there in the dark. She had 
forgotten the light, but he was where she had expected him to be: right beneath the spy hole, at the iron 
door that blocked his escape from the Labyrinth. 
He was standing there, one hand on his hip, the other holding out at an angle the wooden staff, as 
tall as he was, to the tip of which clung the soft will-o'-the-wisp. His head, which she looked down upon 
from some six feet above. was cocked a bit to the side. His clothes were those of any winter traveler or 
pilgrim, a short heavy cloak, a leather tunic, leggings of wool, laced sandals; there was a light pack on 
his back, a water bottle slung from it, a knife sheathed at his hip. He stood there still as a statue, easy and 
thoughtful. 
Slowly he raised his staff from the ground, and held the bright tip of it out towards the door, which 
Arha could not see from her spy hole. The light changed, growing smaller and brighter, an intense 
brilliance. He spoke aloud. The language he spoke was strange to Arha, but stranger to her than the 
words was the voice, deep and resonant. 
The light on the staff brightened, flickered, dimmed. For a moment it died quite away, and she 
could not see him. 
The pale violet marshlight reappeared, steady, and she saw him turn away from the door. His spell 
of opening had failed. The powers that held the lock fast on that door were stronger than any magic he 
possessed. 
He looked about him, as if thinking, now what? 
The tunnel or corridor in which he stood was about five feet wide. Its roof was from twelve to 
fifteen feet above the rough rock floor. The walls here were of dressed stone, laid without mortar but 
very carefully and closely, so that one could scarcely slip a knife-tip into the joints. They leaned inward 
increasingly as they rose, forming a vault. 
There was nothing else. 

 He started forward. One stride took him out of Arha's range of vision. The light died away. She was 
about to replace the cloth and the tile, when again the soft shaft of light rose up out of the floor before 
her. He had come back to the door. Perhaps he had realized that if he once left it and entered the maze, 
he was not very likely to find it again. 
He spoke, one word only, in a low voice. "Emenn," he said, and then again, louder, "Emenn!" And 
the iron door rattled in its jambs, and low echoes rolled down the vaulted tunnel like thunder, and it 
seemed to Arha that the floor beneath her shook. 
But the door stayed fast. 
He laughed then, a short laugh, that of a man who thinks, "What a fool I've made of myself!" He 
looked around the walls once more, and as he glanced upward Arha saw the smile lingering on his dark 
face. Then he sat down, unslung his pack, got out a piece of dry bread, and munched on it. He unstopped 
his leather bottle of water and shook it; it looked light in his hand, as if nearly empty. He replaced the 
stopper without drinking. He put the pack behind him for a pillow, pulled his cloak around him, and lay 
down. His staff was in his right hand. As he lay back, the little wisp or ball of light floated upward from 
the staff and hung dimly behind his head, a few feet off the ground. His left hand was on his breast, 
holding something that hung from a heavy chain around his neck. He lay there quite comfortable, legs 
crossed at the ankle; his gaze wandered across the spy hole and away; he sighed and closed his eyes. The 
light grew slowly dimmer. He slept. 
The clenched hand on his breast relaxed and slipped aside, and the watcher above saw then what 
talisman he wore on the chain: a bit of rough metal, crescent-shaped, it seemed. 
The faint glimmer of his sorcery died away. He lay in silence and the dark. 
Arha replaced the cloth and reset the tile in its place, rose cautiously and slipped away to her room. 
There she lay long awake in the wind-loud darkness, seeing always before her the crystal radiance that 
had shimmered in the house of death, the soft unburning fire, the stones of the tunnel wall, the quiet face 
of the man asleep. 
------ 
The Man Trap 
------ 
Next day, when she had finished with her duties at the various temples, and with her teaching of the 
sacred dances to the novices, she slipped away to the Small House and, darkening the room, opened the 
spy hole and peered down it. There was no light. He was gone. She had not thought he would stay so 
long at the unavailing door, but it was the only place she knew to look. How was she to find him now 
that he had lost himself? 
The tunnels of the Labyrinth, by Thar's account and her own experience, extended in all their 
windings, branchings, spirals, and dead ends, for more than twenty miles. The blind alley that lay 
farthest from the Tombs was not much more than a mile away in a straight line, probably. But down 
underground, nothing ran straight. All the tunnels curved, split, rejoined, branched, interlaced, looped, 

traced elaborate routes that ended where they began, for there was no beginning, and no end. One could 
go, and go, and go, and still get nowhere, for there was nowhere to get to. There was no center, no heart 
of the maze. And once the door was locked, there was no end to it. No direction was right. 
Though the ways and turnings to the various rooms and regions were firm in Arha's memory, even 
she had taken with her on her longer explorations a ball of fine yarn, and let it unravel behind her, and 
rewound it as she followed it returning. For if one of the turns and passages that must be counted were 
missed, even she might be lost. A light was no help, for there were no, landmarks. All the corridors, all 
the doorways and openings, were alike. 
He might have gone miles by now, and yet not be forty feet from the door where he had entered. 
She went to the Hall of the Throne, and to the Twin Gods' temple, and to the cellar under the 
kitchens, and, choosing a moment when she was alone, looked through each of those spy holes down 
into the cold, thick dark. When night came, freezing and blazing with stars, she went to certain places on 
the Hill and raised up certain stones, cleared away the earth, peered down again, and saw the starless 
darkness underground. 
He was there. He must be there. Yet he had escaped her. He would die of thirst before she found 
him. She would have to send Manan into the maze to find him, once she was sure he was dead. That was 
unbearable to think of. As she knelt in the starlight on the bitter ground of the Hill, tears of rage rose in 
her eyes. 
She went to the path that led back down the slope to the temple of the Godking. The columns with 
their carved capitals shone white with hoarfrost in the starlight, like pillars of bone. She knocked at the 
rear door, and Kossil let her in. 
"What brings my mistress?" said the stout woman, cold and watchful. 
"Priestess, there is a man within the Labyrinth." 
Kossil was taken off guard; for once something had occurred that she did not expect. She stood and 
stared. Her eyes seemed to swell a little. It flitted across Arha's mind that Kossil looked very like Penthe 
imitating Kossil, and a wild laugh rose up in her, was repressed, and died away. 
"A man? In the Labyrinth?" 
"A man, a stranger." Then as Kossil continued to look at her with disbelief, she added, "I know a 
man by sight, though I have seen few." 
Kossil disdained her irony. "How came a man there?" 
"By witchcraft, I think. His skin is dark, perhaps he is from the Inner Lands. He came to rob the 
Tombs. I found him first in the Undertomb, beneath the very Stones. He ran to the entrance of the 
Labyrinth when he became aware of me, as if he knew where he went. I locked the iron door behind 
him. He made spells, but that did not open the door. In the morning he went on into the maze. I cannot 
find him now." 
"Has he a light?" 
"Yes." 
"Water?" 
"A little flask, not full." 
"His candle will be burned down already." Kossil pondered. "Four or five days. Maybe six. Then 
you can send my wardens down to drag the body out. The blood should be fed to the Throne and the -" 
"No," Arha said with sudden, shrill fierceness. "I wish to find him alive." 
The priestess looked down at the girl from her heavy height. "Why?" 

 "To make- to make his dying longer. He has committed sacrilege against the Nameless Ones. He 
has defiled the Undertomb with light. He came to rob the Tombs of their treasures. He must be punished 
with worse than lying down in a tunnel alone and dying." 
"Yes," Kossil said, as if deliberating. "But how will you catch him, mistress? That is chancy. There 
is no chance about the other. Is there not a room full of bones, somewhere in the Labyrinth, bones of 
men who entered it and did not leave it?... Let the Dark Ones punish him in their own way, in their own 
ways, the black ways of the Labyrinth. It is a cruel death, thirst." 
"I know," the girl said. She turned and went out into the night, pulling her hood up over her head 
against the hissing, icy wind. Did she not know? 
It had been childish of her, and stupid, to come to Kossil. She would get no help there. Kossil 
herself knew nothing, all she knew was cold waiting and death at the end of it. She did not understand. 
She did not see that the man must be found. It must not be the same as with those others. She could not 
bear that again. Since there must be death let it be swift, in daylight. Surely it would be more fitting that 
this thief, the first man in centuries brave enough to try to rob the Tombs, should die by sword's edge. 
He did not even have an immortal soul to be reborn. His ghost would go whining through the corridors. 
He could not be let die of thirst there alone in the dark. 
Arha slept very little that night. The next day was filled with rites and duties. She spent the night 
going, silent and without lantern, from one spy hole to another in all the dark buildings of the Place, and 
on the windswept hill. She went to the Small House to bed at last, two or three hours before dawn, but 
still she could not rest. On the third day, late in the afternoon, she walked out alone onto the desert, 
towards the river that now lay low in the winter drought, with ice among the reeds. A memory had come 
to her that once, in the autumn, she had gone very far in the Labyrinth, past the Six-Cross, and all along 
one long curving corridor she had heard behind the stones the sound of running water. Might not a man 
athirst, if he came that way, stay there? There were spy holes even out here; she had to search for them, 
but Thar had shown her each one, last year, and she refound them without much trouble. Her recall of 
place and shape was like that of a blind person: she seemed to feel her way to each hidden spot, rather 
than to look for it. At the second, the farthest of all from the Tombs, when she pulled up her hood to cut 
out light, and put her eye to the hole cut in a flat pan of rock, she saw below her the dim glimmer of the 
wizardly light. 
He was there, half out of sight. The spy hole looked down at the very end of the blind alley. She 
could see only his back, and bent neck, and right arm. He sat near the corner of the walls, and was 
picking at the stones with his knife, a short dagger of steel with a jeweled grip. The blade of it was 
broken short. The broken point lay directly under the spy hole. He had snapped it trying to pry apart the 
stones, to get at the water he could hear running, clear and murmurous in that dead stillness under earth, 
on the other side of the impenetrable wall. 
His movements were listless. He was very different, after these three nights and days, from the 
figure that had stood lithe and calm before the iron door and laughed at his own defeat. He was still 
obstinate, but the power was gone out of him. He had no spell to stir those stones aside, but must use his 
useless knife. Even his sorcerer's light was wan and dim. As Arha watched, the light flickered; the man's 
head jerked and he dropped the dagger. Then doggedly he picked it up and tried to force the broken 
blade between the stones. 
Lying among ice-bound reeds on the riverbank, unconscious of where she was or what she was 
doing, Arha put her mouth to the cold mouth of rock, and cupped her hands around to hold the sound in. 

"Wizard!" she said, and her voice slipping down the stone throat whispered coldly in the tunnel 
underground. 
The man started and scrambled to his feet, so going out of the circle of her vision when she looked 
for him. She put her mouth to the spy hole again and said, "Go back along the river wall to the second 
turn. The first turn right, miss one, then right again. At the Six Ways, right again. Then left, and right, 
and left, and right. Stay there in the Painted Room." 
As she moved to look again, she must have let a shaft of daylight shoot through the spy hole into 
the tunnel for a moment, for when she looked he was back in the circle of her vision and staring upwards 
at the opening. His face, which she now saw to be scarred in some way, was strained and eager. The lips 
were parched and black, the eyes bright. He raised his staff, bringing the light closer and closer to her 
eyes. Frightened, she drew back, stopped the spy hole with its rock lid and litter of covering stones, rose, 
and went back swiftly to the Place. She found her hands were shaky, and sometimes a giddiness swept 
over her as she walked. She did not know what to do. 
If he followed the directions she had given him, he would come back in the direction of the iron 
door, to the room of pictures. There was nothing there, no reason for him to go there. There was a spy 
hole in the ceiling of the Painted Room, a good one, in the treasury of the Twin Gods' temple; perhaps 
that was why she had thought of it. She did not know. Why had she spoken to him? 
She could let a little water for him down one of the spy holes, and then call him to that place. That 
would keep him alive longer. As long as she pleased, indeed. If she put down water and a little food now 
and then, he would go on and on, days, months, wandering in the Labyrinth: and she could watch him 
through the spy holes, and tell him where water was to be found, and sometimes tell him falsely so he 
would go in vain, but he would always have to go. That would teach him to mock the Nameless Ones, to 
swagger his foolish manhood in the burial places of the Immortal Dead! 
But so long as he was there, she would never be able to enter the Labyrinth herself. Why not? she 
asked herself, and replied- Because he might escape by the iron door, which I must leave open behind 
me... But he could escape no farther than the Undertomb. The truth was that she was afraid to face him. 
She was afraid of his power, the arts he had used to enter the Undertomb, the sorcery that kept that light 
burning. And yet, was that so much to be feared? The powers that ruled in the dark places were on her 
side, not his. Plainly he could not do much, there in the realm of the Nameless Ones. He had not opened 
the iron door; he had not summoned magic food, nor brought water through the wall, nor conjured up 
some demon monster to break down the walls, all of which she had feared he might be able to do. He 
had not even found his way in three days' wandering to the door of the Great Treasury, which surely he 
had sought. Arha herself had never yet pursued Thar's directions to that room, putting off and putting off 
the journey out of a certain awe, a reluctance, a sense that the time had not yet come. 
Now she thought, why should he not go that journey for her? He could look all he liked at the 
treasures of the Tombs. Much good they would do him! She could jeer at him, and tell him to eat the 
gold, and drink the diamonds. 
With the nervous, feverish hastiness that had possessed her all these three days, she ran to the Twin 
Gods' temple, unlocked its little vaulted treasury, and uncovered the well-hidden spy hole in the floor. 
The Painted Room was below, but pitch dark. The way the man must follow in the maze was much 
more roundabout, miles longer perhaps; she had forgotten that. And no doubt he was weakened and not 
going fast. Perhaps he would forget her directions and take the wrong turning. Few people could 
remember directions from one hearing of them, as she could. Perhaps he did not even understand the 

tongue she spoke. If so, let him wander till he fell down and died in the dark, the fool, the foreigner, the 
unbeliever. Let his ghost whine down the stone roads of the Tombs of Atuan until the darkness ate even 
it... 
Next morning very early, after a night of little sleep and evil dreams, she returned to the spy hole in 
the little temple. She looked down and saw nothing: blackness. She lowered a candle burning in a little 
tin lantern on a chain. He was there, in the Painted Room. She saw, past the candle's glare, his legs and 
one limp hand. She spoke into the spy hole, which was a large one, the size of a whole floor tile: 
"Wizard!" 
No movement. Was he dead? Was that all the strength he had in him? She sneered; her heart 
pounded. "Wizard!" she cried, her voice ringing in the hollow room beneath. He stirred, and slowly sat 
up, and looked around bewildered. After a while he looked up, blinking at the tiny lantern that swung 
from his ceiling. His face was terrible to see, swollen, dark as a mummy's face. 
He put his hand out to his staff that lay on the floor beside him, but no light flowered on the wood. 
There was no power left in him. 
"Do you want to see the treasure of the Tombs of Atuan, wizard?" 
He looked up wearily, squinting at the light of her lantern, which was all he could see. After a 
while, with a wince that might have begun as a smile, he nodded once. 
"Go out of this room to the left. Take the first corridor to the left..." She rattled off the long series of 
directions without pause, and at the end said, "There you will find the treasure which you came for. And 
there, maybe, you'll find water. Which would you rather have now, wizard?" 
He got to his feet, leaning on his staff. Looking up with eyes that could not see her, he tried to say 
something, but there was no voice in his dry throat. He shrugged a little, and left the Painted Room. 
She would not give him any water. He would never find the way to the treasure room, anyway. The 
instructions were too long for him to remember; and there was the Pit, if he got that far. He was in the 
dark, now. He would lose his way, and would fall down at last and die somewhere in the narrow, 
hollow, dry halls. And Manan would find him and drag him out. And that was the end. Arha clutched the 
lip of the spy hole with her hands, and rocked her crouching body back and forth, back and forth, biting 
her lip as if to bear some dreadful pain. She would not give him any water. She would not give him any 
water. She would give him death, death, death, death, death. 
In that gray hour of her life, Kossil came to her, entering the treasury room with heavy step, bulky 
in black winter robes. 
"Is the man dead yet?" 
Arha raised her head. There were no tears in her eyes, nothing to hide. 
"I think so," she said, getting up and dusting her skirts. "His light has gone out." 
"He may be tricking. The soulless ones are very cunning." 
"I shall wait a day to be sure." 
"Yes, or two days. Then Duby can go down and bring it out. He is stronger than old Manan." 
"But Manan is in the service of the Nameless Ones, and Duby is not. There are places within the 
Labyrinth where Duby should not go, and the thief is in one of these." 
"Why, then it is defiled already-" 
"It will be made clean by his death there," Arha said. She could see by Kossil's expression that 
there must be something strange about her own face. "This is my domain, priestess. I must care for it as 

my Masters bid me. I do not need more lessons in death." 
Kossil's face seemed to withdraw into the black hood, like a desert tortoise's into its shell, sour and 
slow and cold. "Very well, mistress." 
They parted before the altar of the God-Brothers. Arha went, without haste now, to the Small 
House, and called Manan to accompany her. Since she had spoken to Kossil she knew what must be 
done. 
She and Manan went together up the hill, into the Hall, down into the Undertomb. Straining 
together at the long handle, they opened the iron door of the Labyrinth. They lit their lanterns there, and 
entered. Arha led the way to the Painted Room, and from it started on the way to the Great Treasury. 
The thief had not got very far. She and Manan had not walked five hundred paces on their tortuous 
course when they came upon him, crumpled up in the narrow corridor like a heap of rags thrown down. 
He had dropped his staff before he fell; it lay some distance from him. His mouth was bloody, his eyes 
half shut. 
"He's alive," said Manan, kneeling, his great yellow hand on the dark throat, feeling the pulse. 
"Shall I strangle him, mistress?" 
"No. I want him alive. Pick him up and bring him after me." 
"Alive?" said Manan, disturbed. "What for, little mistress?" 
"To be a slave of the Tombs! Be still with your talk and do as I say." 
His face more melancholy than ever, Manan obeyed, hoisting the young man effortfully up onto his 
shoulders like a long sack. He staggered along after Arha thus laden. He could not go far at a time under 
that load. They stopped a dozen times on the return journey for Manan to catch his breath. At each halt 
the corridor was the same: the grayish-yellow, close-set stones rising to a vault, the uneven rocky floor, 
the dead air; Manan groaning and panting, the stranger lying still, the two lanterns burning dull in a 
dome of light that narrowed away into darkness down the corridor in both directions. At each halt Arha 
dripped some of the water she had brought in a flask into the dry mouth of the man, a little at a time, lest 
life returning kill him. 
"To the Room of Chains?" Manan asked, as they were in the passage that led to the iron door; and 
at that, Arha thought for the first time where she must take this prisoner. She did not know. 
"Not there, no," she said, sickened as ever by the memory of the smoke and reek and the matted, 
speechless, unseeing faces. And Kossil might come to the Room of Chains "He... he must stay in the 
Labyrinth, so that he cannot regain his sorcery. Where is there a room..." 
"The Painted Room has a door, and a lock, and a spy hole, mistress. If you trust him with doors." 
"He has no powers, down here. Take him there, Manan." 
So Manan lugged him back, half again as far as they had come, too laboring and breathless to 
protest. When they entered the Painted Room at last, Arha took off her long, heavy winter cloak of wool, 
and laid it on the dusty floor. "Put him on that," she said. 
Manan stared in melancholy consternation, wheezing. "Little mistress-" 
"I want the man to live, Manan. He'll die of the cold, look how he shakes now." 
"Your garment will be defiled. The Priestess' garment. He is an unbeliever, a man," Manan blurted, 
his small eyes wrinkling up as if in pain. 
"Then I shall burn the cloak and have another woven! Come on, Manan!" 
At that he stooped, obedient, and let the prisoner flop off his back onto the black cloak. The man 
lay still as death, but the pulse beat heavy in his throat, and now and then a spasm made his body shiver 

as it lay. 
"He should be chained," said Manan. 
"Does he look dangerous?" Arha scoffed; but when Manan pointed out an iron hasp set into the 
stones, to which the prisoner could be fastened, she let him go fetch a chain and band from the Room of 
Chains. He grumbled off down the corridors, muttering the directions to himself; he had been to and 
from the Painted Room before this, but never by himself. 
In the light of her single lantern the paintings on the four walls seemed to move, to twitch, the 
uncouth human forms with great drooping wings, squatting and standing in a timeless dreariness. 
She knelt and let water drop, a little at a time, into the prisoner's mouth. At last he coughed, and his 
hands reached up feebly to the flask. She let him drink. He lay back with his face all wet, besmeared 
with dust and blood, and muttered something, a word or two in a language she did not know. 
Manan returned at last, dragging a length of iron links, a great padlock with its key, and an iron 
band which fitted around the man's waist and locked there. "It's not tight enough, he can slip out," he 
grumbled as he locked the end link onto the ring set in the wall. 
"No, look." Feeling less fearful of her prisoner now, Arha showed that she could not force her hand 
between the iron band and the man's ribs. "Not unless he starves longer than four days." 
"Little mistress," Manan said plaintively, "I do not question, but... what good is he as a slave to the 
Nameless Ones? He is a man, little one." 
"And you are an old fool, Manan. Come along now, finish your fussing." 
The prisoner watched them with bright, weary eyes. 
"Where's his staff, Manan? There. I'll take that; it has magic in it. Oh, and this; this I'll take too," 
and with a quick movement she seized the silver chain that showed at the neck of the man's tunic, and 
tore it off over his head, though he tried to catch her arms and stop her. Manan kicked him in the back. 
She swung the chain over him, out of his reach. "Is this your talisman, wizard? Is it precious to you? It 
doesn't look like much, couldn't you afford a better one? I shall keep it safe for you." And she slipped 
the chain over her own head, hiding the pendant under the heavy collar of her woolen robe. 
"You don't know what to do with it," he said, very hoarse, and mispronouncing the words of the 
Kargish tongue, but clearly enough. 
Manan kicked him again, and at that he made a little grunt of pain and shut his eyes. 
"Leave off, Manan. Come." 
She left the room. Grumbling, Manan followed. 
That night, when all the lights of the Place were out, she climbed the hill again, alone. She filled her 
flask from the well in the room behind the Throne, and took the water and a big, flat, unleavened cake of 
buckwheat bread down to the Painted Room in the Labyrinth. She set them just within the prisoner's 
reach, inside the door. He was asleep, and never stirred. She returned to the Small House, and that night 
she too slept long and sound. 
In early afternoon she returned alone to the Labyrinth. The bread was gone, the flask was dry, the 
stranger was sitting up, his back against the wall. His face still looked hideous with dirt and scabs, but 
the expression of it was alert. 
She stood across the room from him where he could not possibly reach her, chained as be was, and 
looked at him. Then she looked away. But there was nowhere particular to look. Something prevented 
her speaking. Her heart beat as if she were afraid. There was no reason to fear him. He was at her mercy. 
"It's pleasant to have light," he said in the soft but deep voice, which perturbed her. 

 "What's your name?" she asked, peremptory. Her own voice, she thought, sounded uncommonly 
high and thin. 
"Well, mostly I'm called Sparrowhawk." 
"Sparrowhawk? Is that your name?" 
"No." 
"What is your name, then?" 
"I cannot tell you that. Are you the One Priestess of the Tombs?" 
"Yes." 
"What are you called?" 
"I am called Arha." 
"The one who has been devoured - is that what it means?" His dark eyes watched her intently. He 
smiled a little. "What is your name?" 
"I have no name. Do not ask me questions. Where do you come from?" 
"From the Inner Lands, the West." 
"From Havnor?" 
It was the only name of a city or island of the Inner Lands that she knew. 
"Yes, from Havnor." 
"Why did you come here?" 
"The Tombs of Atuan are famous among my people." 
"But you're an infidel, an unbeliever." 
He shook his head. "Oh no, Priestess. I believe in the powers of darkness! I have met with the 
Unnamed Ones, in other places." 
"What other places?" 
"In the Archipelago -the Inner Lands- there are places which belong to the Old Powers of the Earth, 
like this one. But none so great as this one. Nowhere else have they a temple, and a priestess, and such 
worship as they receive here." 
"You came to worship them," she said, jeering. 
"I came to rob them," he said. 
She stared at his grave face. "Braggart!" 
"I knew it would not be easy." 
"Easy! It cannot be done. If you weren't an unbeliever you'd know that. The Nameless Ones look 
after what is theirs." 
"What I seek is not theirs." 
"It's yours, no doubt?" 
"Mine to claim." 
"What are you then- a god? a king?" She looked him up and down, as he sat chained, dirty, 
exhausted. "You are nothing but a thief!" 
He said nothing, but his gaze met hers. 
"You are not to look at me!" she said shrilly. 
"My lady," he said, "I do not mean offense. I am a stranger, and a trespasser. I do not know your 
ways, nor the courtesies due the Priestess of the Tombs. I am at your mercy, and I ask your pardon if I 
offend you." 
She stood silent, and in a moment she felt the blood rising to her cheeks, hot and foolish. But he 

was not looking at her and did not see her blush. He had obeyed, and turned away his dark gaze. 
Neither spoke for some while. The painted figures all around watched them with sad, blind eyes. 
She had brought a stone jug of water. His eyes kept straying to that, and after a time she said, 
"Drink, if you like." 
He hitched himself over to the jug at once, and hefting it as lightly as if it were a wine cup, drank a 
long, long draft. Then he wet a corner of his sleeve, and cleaned the grime and bloodclot and cobweb off 
his face and hands as best he could. He spent some while at this, and the girl watched. When he was 
done he looked better, but his cat-bath had revealed the scars on one side of his face: old scars long 
healed, whitish on his dark skin, four parallel ridges from eye to jawbone, as if from the scraping talons 
of a huge claw. 
"What is that?" she said. "That scar." 
He did not answer at once. 
"A dragon?" she said, trying to scoff. Had she not come down here to make mock of her victim, to 
torment him with his helplessness? 
"No, not a dragon." 
"You're not a dragonlord, at least, then." 
"No," he said rather reluctantly, "I am a dragonlord. But the scars were before that. I told you that I 
had met with the Dark Powers before, in other places of the earth. This on my face is the mark of one of 
the kinship of the Nameless Ones. But no longer nameless, for I learned his name, in the end." 
"What do you mean? What name?" 
"I cannot tell you that," he said, and smiled, though his face was grave. 
"That's nonsense, fool's babble, sacrilege. They are the Nameless Ones! You don't know what 
you're talking about-" 
"I know even better than you, Priestess," he said, his voice deepening. "Look again!" He turned his 
head so she must see the four terrible marks across his cheek. 
"I don't believe you," she said, and her voice shook. 
"Priestess," he said gently, "you are not very old; you can't have served the Dark Ones very long." 
"But I have. Very long! I am the First Priestess, the Reborn. I have served my masters for a 
thousand years and a thousand years before that. I am their servant and their voice and their hands. And I 
am their vengeance on those who defile the Tombs and look upon what is not to be seen! Stop your 
lying and your boasting, can't you see that if I say one word my guard will come and cut your head off 
your shoulders? Or if I go away and lock this door, then nobody will come, ever, and you'll die here in 
the dark, and those I serve will eat your flesh and eat your soul and leave your bones here in the dust?" 
Quietly, he nodded. 
She stammered, and finding no more to say, swept out of the room and bolted the door behind her 
with a clang. Let him think she wasn't coming back! Let him sweat, there in the dark, let him curse and 
shiver and try to work his foul, useless spells! 
But in her mind's eye she saw him stretching out to sleep, as she had seen him do by the iron door, 
serene as a sheep in a sunny meadow. 
She spat at the bolted door, and made the sign to avert defilement, and went almost at a run towards 
the Undertomb. 
While she skirted its wall on the way to the trapdoor in the Hall, her fingers brushed along the fine 
planes and traceries of rock, like frozen lace. A longing swept over her to light her lantern, to see once 

more, just for a moment, the time-carven stone, the lovely glitter of the walls. She shut her eyes tight and 
hurried on. 
------ 
The Great Treasure 
------ 
Never had the rites and duties of the day seemed so many, or so petty, or so long. The little girls 
with their pale faces and furtive ways, the restless novices, the priestesses whose looks were stern and 
cool but whose lives were all a secret brangle of jealousies and miseries and small ambitions and wasted 
passions- all these women, among whom she had always lived and who made up the human world to 
her, now appeared to her as both pitiable and boring. 
But she who served great powers, she the priestess of grim Night, was free of that pettiness. She did 
not have to care about the grinding meanness of their common life, the days whose one delight was 
likely to be getting a bigger slop of lamb fat over your lentils than your neighbor got... She was free of 
the days altogether. Underground, there were no days. There was always and only night. 
And in that unending night, the prisoner: the dark man, practicer of dark arts, bound in iron and 
locked in stone, waiting for her to come or not to come, to bring him water and bread and life, or a knife 
and a butcher's bowl and death, just as the whim took her. 
She had told no one but Kossil about the man, and Kossil had not told anyone else. He had been in 
the Painted Room three nights and days now, and still she had not asked Arha about him. Perhaps she 
assumed that he was dead, and that Arha had had Manan carry the body to the Room of Bones. It was 
not like Kossil to take anything for granted; but Arha told herself that there was nothing strange about 
Kossil's silence. Kossil wanted everything kept secret, and hated to have to ask questions. And besides, 
Arha had told her not to meddle in her business. Kossil was simply obeying. 
However, if the man was supposed to be dead, Arha could not ask for food for him. So, aside from 
stealing some apples and dried onions from the cellars of the Big House, she did without food. She had 
her morning and evening meals sent to the Small House, pretending she wished to eat alone, and each 
night took the food down to the Painted Room in the Labyrinth, all but the soups. She was used to 
fasting for a day on up to four days at a time, and thought nothing about it. The fellow in the Labyrinth 
ate up her meager portions of bread and cheese and beans as a toad eats a fly: snap! it's gone. Clearly he 
could have done so five or six times over; but he thanked her soberly, as if he were her guest and she his 
hostess at a table such as she had heard of in tales of feasts at the palace of the Godking, all set with 
roast meats and buttered loaves and wine in crystal. He was very strange. 
"What is it like in the Inner Lands?" 
She had brought down a little cross-leg folding stool of ivory, so that she would not have to stand 
while she questioned him, yet would not have to sit down on the floor, on his level. 
"Well, there are many islands. Four times forty, they say, in the Archipelago alone, and then there 
are the Reaches; no man has ever sailed all the Reaches, nor counted all the lands. And each is different 
from the others. But the fairest of them all, maybe, is Havnor, the great land at the center of the world. In 

the heart of Havnor on a broad bay full of ships is the City Havnor. The towers of the city are built of 
white marble. The house of every prince and merchant has a tower, so they rise up one above the other. 
The roofs of the houses are red tile, and all the bridges over the canals are covered in mosaic work, red 
and blue and green. And the flags of the princes are all colors, flying from the white towers. On the 
highest of all the towers the Sword of Erreth-Akbe is set, like a pinnacle, skyward. When the sun rises 
on Havnor it flashes first on that blade and makes it bright, and when it sets the Sword is golden still 
above the evening, for a while." 
"Who was Erreth-Akbe?" she said, sly. 
He looked up at her. He said nothing, but he grinned a little. Then as if on second thoughts he said, 
"It's true you would know little of him here. Nothing beyond his coming to the Kargish lands, perhaps. 
And how much of that tale do you know?" 
"That he lost his sorcerer's staff and his amulet and his power- like you," she answered. "He 
escaped from the High Priest and fled into the west, and dragons killed him. But if he'd come here to the 
Tombs, there had been no need of dragons." 
"True enough," said her prisoner. 
She wanted no more talk of Erreth-Akbe, sensing a danger in the subject. "He was a dragonlord, 
they say. And you say you're one. Tell me, what is a dragonlord?" 
Her tone was always jeering, his answers direct and plain, as if he took her questions in good faith. 
"One whom the dragons will speak with," he said, "that is a dragonlord, or at least that is the center 
of the matter. It's not a trick of mastering the dragons, as most people think. Dragons have no masters. 
The question is always the same, with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you? If you can 
count upon his doing the former, and not doing the latter, why then you're a dragonlord." 
"Dragons can speak?" 
"Surely! In the Eldest Tongue, the language we men learn so hard and use so brokenly, to make our 
spells of magic and of patterning. No man knows all that language, or a tenth of it. He has not time to 
learn it. But dragons live a thousand years... They are worth talking to, as you might guess." 
"Are there dragons here in Atuan?" 
"Not for many centuries, I think, nor in Karego-At. But in your northernmost island, Hur-at-Hur, 
they say there are still large dragons in the mountains. In the Inner Lands they all keep now to the 
farthest west, the remote West Reach, islands where no men live and few men come. If they grow 
hungry, they raid the lands to their east; but that is seldom. I have seen the island where they come to 
dance together. They fly on their great wings in spirals, in and out, higher and higher over the western 
sea, like a storming of yellow leaves in autumn." Full of the vision, his eyes gazed through the black 
paintings on the walls, through the walls and the earth and the darkness, seeing the open sea stretch 
unbroken to the sunset, the golden dragons on the golden wind. 
"You are lying," the girl said fiercely, "you are making it up." 
He looked at her, startled. "Why should I lie, Arha?" 
"To make me feel like a fool, and stupid, and afraid. To make yourself seem wise, and brave, and 
powerful, and a dragon-lord and all this and all that. You've seen dragons dancing, and the towers in 
Havnor, and you know all about everything. And I know nothing at all and haven't been anywhere. But 
all you know is lies! You are nothing but a thief and a prisoner, and you have no soul, and you'll never 
leave this place again. It doesn't matter if there's oceans and dragons and white towers and all that, 
because you'll never see them again, you'll never even see the light of the sun. All I know is the dark, the 

night underground. And that's all there really is. That's all there is to know, in the end. The silence, and 
the dark. You know everything, wizard. But I know one thing - the one true thing!" 
He bowed his head. His long hands, copper-brown, were quiet on his knees. She saw the fourfold 
scar on his cheek. He had gone farther than she into the dark; he knew death better than she did, even 
death... A rush of hatred for him rose up in her, choking her throat for an instant. Why did he sit there so 
defenseless and so strong? Why could she not defeat him? 
"This is why I have let you live," she said suddenly, without the least forethought. "I want you to 
show me how the tricks of sorcerers are performed. So long as you have some art to show me, you'll stay 
alive. If you have none, if it's all foolery and lies, why then I'll have done with you. Do you understand?" 
"Yes." 
"Very well. Go on." 
He put his head in his hands a minute, and shifted his position. The iron belt kept him from ever 
getting quite comfortable, unless he lay down flat. 
He raised his face at last and spoke very seriously. "Listen, Arha. I am a Mage, what you call a 
sorcerer. I have certain arts and powers. That's true. It's also true that here in the Place of the Old 
Powers, my strength is very little and my crafts don't avail me. Now I could work illusion for you, and 
show you all kinds of wonders. That's the least part of wizardry. I could work illusions when I was a 
child; I can do them even here. But if you believe them, they'll frighten you, and you may wish to kill 
me if fear makes you angry. And if you disbelieve them, you'll see them as only lies and foolery, as you 
say; and so I forfeit my life again. And my purpose and desire, at the moment, is to stay alive." 
That made her laugh, and she said, "Oh, you'll stay alive awhile, can't you see that? You are stupid! 
All right, show me these illusions. I know them to be false and won't be afraid of them. I wouldn't be 
afraid if they were real, as a matter of fact. But go ahead. Your precious skin is safe, for tonight, 
anyhow." 
At that he laughed, as she had a moment ago. They tossed his life back and forth between them like 
a ball, playing. 
"What do you wish me to show you?" 
"What can you show me?" 
"Anything." 
"How you brag and brag!" 
"No," he said, evidently a little stung. "I do not. I didn't mean to, anyway." 
"Show me something you think worth seeing. Anything!" 
He bent his head and looked at his hands awhile. Nothing happened. The tallow candle in her 
lantern burned dim and steady. The black pictures on the walls, the bird-winged, flightless figures with 
eyes painted dull red and white, loomed over him and over her. There was no sound. She sighed, 
disappointed and somehow grieved. He was weak; he talked great things, but did nothing. He was 
nothing but a good liar, and not even a good thief. "Well," she said at last, and gathered her skirts 
together to rise. The wool rustled strangely as she moved. She looked down at herself, and stood up in 
startlement. 
The heavy black she had worn for years was gone; her dress was of turquoise-colored silk, bright 
and soft as the evening sky. It belled out full from her hips, and all the skirt was embroidered with thin 
silver threads and seed pearls and tiny crumbs of crystal, so that it glittered softly, like rain in April. 
She looked at the magician, speechless. 

 "Do you like it?" 
"Where-" 
"It's like a gown I saw a princess wear once, at the Feast of Sunreturn in the New Palace in 
Havnor," he said, looking at it with satisfaction. "You told me to show you something worth seeing. I 
show you yourself." 
"Make it- make it go away." 
"You gave me your cloak," he said as if in reproach. "Can I give you nothing? Well, don't worry. 
It's only illusion; see." 
He seemed not to raise a finger, certainly he said no word; but the blue splendor of silk was gone, 
and she stood in her own harsh black. 
She stood still awhile. 
"How do I know," she said at last, "that you are what you seem to be?" 
"You don't," said he. "I don't know what I seem, to you." 
She brooded again. "You could trick me into seeing you as-" She broke off, for he had raised his 
hand and pointed upward, the briefest sketch of a gesture. She thought he was casting a spell, and drew 
back quickly towards the door; but following his gesture, her eyes found high in the dark arching roof 
the small square that was the spy hole from the treasury of the Twin Gods' temple. 
There was no light from the spy hole; she could see nothing, hear no one overhead there; but he had 
pointed, and his questioning gaze was on her. 
Both held perfectly still for some time. 
"Your magic is mere folly for the eyes of children," she said clearly. "It is trickery and lies. I have 
seen enough. You will be fed to the Nameless Ones. I shall not come again." 
She took her lantern and went out, and sent the iron bolts home firm and loud. Then she stopped 
there outside the door and stood dismayed. What must she do? 
How much had Kossil seen or heard? What had they been saying? She could not remember. She 
never seemed to say what she had intended to say to the prisoner. He always confused her with his talk 
about dragons, and towers, and giving names to the Nameless, and wanting to stay alive, and being 
grateful for her cloak to lie on. He never said what he was supposed to say. She had not even asked him 
about the talisman, which she still wore, hidden against her breast. 
That was just as well, since Kossil had been listening. 
Well, what did it matter, what harm could Kossil do? Even as she asked herself the question she 
knew the answer. Nothing is easier to kill than a caged hawk. The man was helpless, chained there in the 
cage of stone. The Priestess of the Godking had only to send her servant Duby to throttle him tonight; or 
if she and Duby did not know the Labyrinth this far, all she need do was blow poison-dust down the spy 
hole into the Painted Room. She had boxes and phials of evil substances, some to poison food or water, 
some that drugged the air, and killed, if one breathed that air too long. And he would be dead in the 
morning, and it would all be over. There would never be a light beneath the Tombs again. 
Arha hastened through the narrow ways of stone to the entrance from the Undertomb, where Manan 
waited for her, squatting patient as an old toad in the dark. He was uneasy about her visits to the 
prisoner. She would not let him come with her all the way, so they had settled on this compromise. Now 
she was glad that he was there at hand. Him, at least, she could trust. 
"Manan, listen. You are to go to the Painted Room, right now. Say to the man that you're taking 
him to be buried alive beneath the Tombs." Manan's little eyes lit up. "Say that aloud. Unlock the chain, 

and take him to-" She halted, for she had not yet decided where she could best hide the prisoner. 
"To the Undertomb," said Manan, eagerly. 
"No, fool. I said to say that, not do it. Wait-" 
What place was safe from Kossil and Kossil's spies? None but the deepest places underground, the 
holiest and most hidden places of the domain of the Nameless, where she dared not come. Yet would 
Kossil not dare almost anything? Afraid of the dark places she might be, but she was one who would 
subdue her fear to gain her ends. There was no telling how much of the plan of the Labyrinth she might 
actually have learned, from Thar, or from the Arha of the previous life, or even from secret explorations 
of her own in past yeas; Arha suspected her of knowing more than she pretended to know. But there was 
one way she surely could not have learned, the best-kept secret. 
"You must bring the man where I lead you, and you must do it in the dark. Then when I bring you 
back here, you will dig a grave in the Undertomb, and make a coffin for it, and put it in the grave empty, 
and fill in the earth again, yet so that it can be felt and found if someone sought for it. A deep grave. Do 
you understand?" 
"No," said Manan, dour and fretful. "Little one, this trickery is not wise. It is not good. There 
should not be a man here! There will come a punishment-" 
"An old fool will have his tongue cut out, yes! Do you dare tell me what is wise? I follow the orders 
of the Dark Powers. Follow me!" 
"I'm sorry, little mistress, I'm sorry..." 
They returned to the Painted Room. There she waited outside in the tunnel, while Manan entered 
and unlocked the chain from the hasp in the wall. She heard the deep voice ask, "Where now, Manan?" 
and the husky alto answer, sullenly, "You are to be buried alive, my mistress says. Under the 
Tombstones. Get up!" She heard the heavy chain crack like a whip. 
The prisoner came out, his arms bound with Manan's leather belt. Manan came behind, holding him 
like a dog on a short leash, but the collar was around his waist and the leash was iron. His eyes turned to 
her, but she blew out her candle and without a word set off into the dark. She fell at once into the slow 
but fairly steady pace that she usually kept when she was not using a light in the Labyrinth, brushing her 
fingertips very lightly but almost constantly along the walls on either side. Manan and the prisoner 
followed behind, much more awkward because of the leash, shuffling and stumbling along. But in the 
dark they must go; for she did not want either of them to learn this way. 
A left turn from the Painted Room, and pass two openings; go right at the Four Ways, and pass the 
opening to the right; then a long curving way, and a flight of steps down, long, slippery, and much too 
narrow for normal human feet. Farther than these steps she had never gone. 
The air was fouler here, very still, with a sharp odor to it. The directions were clear in her mind, 
even the tones of Thar's voice speaking them. Down the steps (behind her, the prisoner stumbled in the 
pitch blackness, and she heard him gasp as Manan kept him afoot with a mighty jerk on the chain), and 
at the foot of the steps turn at once to the left. Hold the left, then for three openings, then the first right, 
then hold to the right. The tunnels curved and angled, none ran straight. "Then you must skirt the Pit," 
said Thar's voice in the darkness of her mind, "and the way is very narrow." 
She slowed her step, stooped over, and felt before her with one hand along the floor. The corridor 
now ran straight for a long way, giving false reassurance to the wanderer. All at once her groping hand, 
which never ceased to touch and sweep the rock before her, felt nothing. There was a stone lip, an edge: 
beyond the edge, void. To the right the wall of the corridor plunged down sheer into the pit. To the left 

there was a ledge or curb, not much more than a hand's breadth wide. 
"There is a pit. Face the wall to the left, press against it, and go sideways. Slide your feet. Keep 
hold of the chain, Manan... Are you on the ledge? It grows narrower. Don't put your weight on your 
heels. So, I'm past the pit. Reach me your hand. There..." 
The tunnel ran in short zigzags with many side openings. From some of these as they passed the 
sound of their footsteps echoed in a strange way, hollowly; and stranger than that, a very faint draft 
could be felt, sucking inward. Those corridors must end in pits like the one they had passed. Perhaps 
there lay, under this low part of the Labyrinth, a hollow place, a cavern so deep and so vast that the 
cavern of the Undertomb would be little in comparison, a huge black inward emptiness. 
But above that chasm, where they went in the dark tunnels, the corridors grew slowly narrower and 
lower, until even Arha must stoop. Was there no end to this way? 
The end came suddenly: a shut door. Going bent over, and a little faster than usual, Arha ran up 
against it, jarring her head and hands. She felt for the keyhole, then for the small key on her belt-ring, 
never used, the silver key with the haft shaped like a dragon. It fit, it turned. She opened the door of the 
Great Treasure of the Tombs of Atuan. A dry, sour, stale air sighed outward through the dark. 
"Manan, you may not enter here. Wait outside the door." 
"He, but not I?" 
"If you enter this room, Manan, you will not leave it. That is the law for all but me. No mortal 
being but I has ever left this room alive. Will you go in?" 
"I will wait outside," said the melancholy voice in the blackness. "Mistress, mistress, don't shut the 
door-" , 
His alarm so unnerved her that she left the door ajar. Indeed the place filled her with a dull dread, 
and she felt some mistrust of the prisoner, pinioned though he was. Once inside, she struck her light. Her 
hands trembled. The lantern candle caught reluctantly; the air was close and dead. In the yellowish 
flicker that seemed bright after the long passages of night, the treasure room loomed about them, full of 
moving shadows. 
There were six great chests, all of stone, all thick with a fine gray dust like the mold on bread; 
nothing else. The walls were rough, the roof low. The place was cold, with a deep and airless cold that 
seemed to stop the blood in the heart. There were no cobwebs, only the dust. Nothing lived here, nothing 
at all, not even the rare, small, white spiders of the Labyrinth. The dust was thick, thick, and every grain 
of it might be a day that had passed here where there was no time or light: days, months, years, ages all 
gone to dust. 
"This is the place you sought," Arha said, and her voice was steady. "This is the Great Treasure of 
the Tombs. You have come to it. You cannot ever leave it." 
He said nothing, and his face was quiet, but there was in his eyes something that moved her: a 
desolation, the look of one betrayed. 
"You said you wanted to stay alive. This is the only place I know where you can stay alive. Kossil 
will kill you or make me kill you, Sparrowhawk. But here she cannot reach." 
Still he said nothing. 
"You could never have left the Tombs in any case, don't you see? This is no different. And at least 
you've come to... to the end of your journey. What you sought is here." 
He sat down on one of the great chests, looking spent. The trailing chain clanked harshly on the 
stone. He looked around at the gray walls and the shadows, then at her. 

 She looked away from him, at the stone chests. She had no wish at all to open them. She did not 
care what marvels rotted in them. 
"You don't have to wear that chain, in here." She came to him and unlocked the iron belt, and 
unbuckled Manan's leather belt from his arms. "I must lock the door, but when I come I will trust you. 
You know that you cannot leave- that you must not try? I am their vengeance, I do their will; but if I fail 
them -if you fail my trust- then they will avenge themselves. You must not try to leave the room, by 
hurting me or tricking me when I come. You must believe me." 
"I will do as you say," he said gently. 
"I'll bring food and water when I can. There won't be much. Water enough, but not much food for a 
while; I'm getting hungry, do you see? But enough to stay alive on. I may not be able to come back for a 
day or two days, perhaps even longer. I must get Kossil off the track. But I will come. I promise. Here's 
the flask. Hoard it, I can't come back soon. But I will come back." 
He raised his face to her. His expression was strange. "Take care, Tenar," he said. 
------ 
Names 
------ 
She brought Manan back through the winding ways in the dark, and left him in the dark of the 
Undertomb, to dig the grave that must be there as proof to Kossil that the thief had indeed been 
punished. It was late, and she went straight to the Small House to bed. In the night she woke suddenly; 
she remembered that she had left her cloak in the Painted Room. He would have nothing for warmth in 
that dank vault but his own short cloak, no bed but the dusty stone. A cold grave, a cold grave, she 
thought miserably, but she was too weary to wake up fully, and soon slipped back into sleep. She began 
to dream. She dreamt of the souls of the dead on the walls of the Painted Room, the figures like great 
bedraggled birds with human hands and feet and faces, squatting in the dust of the dark places. They 
could not fly. Clay was their food and dust their drink. They were the souls of those not reborn, the 
ancient peoples and the unbelievers, those whom the Nameless Ones devoured. They squatted all around 
her in the shadows, and a faint creaking or cheeping sound came from them now and then. One of them 
came up quite close to her. She was afraid at first and tried to draw away, but could not move. This one 
had the face of a bird, not a human face; but its hair was golden, and it said in, a woman's voice, 
"Tenar," tenderly, softly, "Tenar." 
She woke. Her mouth was stopped with clay. She lay in a stone tomb, underground. Her arms and 
legs were bound with graveclothes and she could not move or speak. 
Her despair grew so great that it burst her breast open and like a bird of fire shattered the stone and 
broke out into the light of daythe light of day, faint in her windowless room. 
Really awake this time, she sat up, worn out by that night's dreaming, her mind befogged. She got 
into her clothes, and went out to the cistern in the walled courtyard of the Small House. She plunged her 
arms and face, her whole head, into the icy water until her body jumped with cold and her blood raced. 
Then flinging back her dripping hair she stood erect and looked up into the morning sky. 
It was not long past sunrise, a fair winter's day. The sky was yellowish, very clear. High up, so high 
he caught the sunlight and burned like a fleck of gold, a bird was circling, a hawk or desert eagle. 

 "I am Tenar," she said, not aloud, and she shook with cold, and terror, and exultation, there under 
the open, sunwashed sky. "I have my name back. I am Tenar!" 
The golden fleck veered westward towards the mountains, out of sight. Sunrise gilded the eaves of 
the Small House. Sheep bells clanked, down in the folds. The smells of woodsmoke and buckwheat 
porridge from the kitchen chimneys drifted on the fine, fresh wind. 
"I am so hungry... How did he know? How did he know my name?... Oh, I've got to go eat, I'm so 
hungry..." 
She pulled up her hood and ran off to breakfast. 
Food, after three days of semi-fasting, made her feel solid, gave her ballast; she didn't feel so wild 
and lighthearted and frightened. She felt quite capable of handling Kossil, after breakfast. 
She came up beside the tall, stout figure on the way out of the dining hall of the Big House, and 
said in a low voice, "I have done away with the robber... What a fine day it is!" 
The cold gray eyes looked sidelong at her from the black hood. 
"I thought that the Priestess must abstain from eating for three days after a human sacrifice?" 
This was true. Arha had forgotten it, and her face showed that she had forgotten. 
"He is not dead yet," she said at last, trying to feign the indifferent tone that had come so easily a 
moment ago. "He is buried alive. Under the Tombs. In a coffin. There will be some air, the coffin isn't 
sealed, it's a wooden one. It will go quite slowly; the dying. When I know he is dead then I'll begin the 
fast." 
"How will you know?" 
Flustered, she hesitated again. "I will know. The... My Masters will tell me." 
"I see. Where is the grave?" 
"In the Undertomb. I told Manan to dig it beneath the Smooth Stone." She must not answer so 
quickly, in that foolish, appeasing tone; she must be on her dignity with Kossil. 
"Alive, in a wooden coffin. That's a risky thing with a sorcerer, mistress. Did you make sure his 
mouth was stopped so he cannot say charms? Are his hands bound? They can weave spells with the 
motion of a finger, even when their tongues are cut out." 
"There is nothing to his sorcery, it is mere tricking," the girl said, raising her voice. "He is buried, 
and my Masters are waiting for his soul. And the rest does not concern you, priestess!" 
This time she had gone too far. Others could hear; Penthe and a couple of other girls, Duby, and the 
priestess Mebbeth, all were in hearing distance. The girls were all ears, and Kossil was aware of it. 
"All that happens here is my concern, mistress. All that happens in his realm is the concern of the 
Godking, the Man Immortal, whose servant I am. Even into the places underground and into the hearts 
of men does he search and look, and none shall forbid him entrance!" 
"I shall. Into the Tombs no one comes if the Nameless Ones forbid it. They were before your 
Godking and they will be after him. Speak softly of them, priestess. Do not call their vengeance on you. 
They will come into your dreams, they will enter the dark places in your mind, and you will go mad." 
The girl's eyes were blazing. Kossil's face was hidden, drawn back into the black cowl. Penthe and 
the others watched, terrified and enthralled. 
"They are old," Kossil's voice said, not loud, a whistling thread of sound out of the depths of the 
cowl. "They are old. Their worship is forgotten, save in this one place. Their power is gone. They are 
only shadows. They have no power any more. Do not try to frighten me, Eaten One. You are the First 

Priestess; does that not mean also that you are the last?... You cannot trick me. I see into your heart. The 
darkness hides nothing from me. Take care, Arha!" 
She turned and went on, with her massive, deliberate steps, crushing the frost-starred weeds under 
her heavy, sandaled feet, going to the white-pillared house of the Godking. 
The girl stood, slight and dark, as if frozen to earth, in the front courtyard of the Big House. 
Nobody moved, nothing moved, only Kossil, in all the vast landscape of court and temple, hill and 
desert plain and mountain. 
"May the Dark Ones eat your soul, Kossil!" she shouted in a voice like a hawk's scream, and lifting 
her arm with the hand stretched out stiff, she brought the curse down on the priestess' heavy back, even 
as she set foot on the steps of her temple. Kossil staggered, but did not stop or turn. She went on, and 
entered the Godking's door. 
Arha spent that day sitting on the lowest step of the Empty Throne. She dared not go into the 
Labyrinth; she would not go among the other priestesses. A heaviness filled her, and held her there hour 
after hour in the cold dusk of the great hall. She stared at the pairs of thick pale columns going off into 
the gloom at the distant end of the hall, and at the shafts of daylight that slanted in from holes in the 
roof, and at the thick-curling smoke from the bronze tripod of charcoal near the Throne. She made 
patterns with the little bones of mice on the marble stair, her head bowed, her mind active and yet as if 
stupefied. Who am I? she asked herself, and got no answer. 
Manan came shuffling down the hall between the double rows of columns, when the light had long 
since ceased to shaft the hall's darkness, and the cold had grown intense. Manan's doughy face was very 
sad. He stood at a distance from her, his big hands hanging; a torn hem of his rusty cloak dangled by his 
heel. 
"Little mistress." 
"What is it, Manan?" She looked at him with dull affection. 
"Little one, let me do what you said... what you said was done. He must die, little one. He has 
bewitched you. She will have revenge. She is old and cruel, and you are too young. You have not 
strength enough." 
"She can't hurt me." 
"If she killed you, even in the sight of all, in the open, there is none in all the Empire who would 
dare punish her. She is the High Priestess of the Godking, and the Godking rules. But she won't kill you 
in the open. She will do it by stealth, by poison, in the night." 
"Then I will be born again." 
Manan twisted his big hands together. "Perhaps she will not kill you," he whispered. 
"What do you mean?" 
"She could lock you into a room in the... down there... As you have done with him. And you would 
be alive for years and years, maybe. For years... And no new Priestess would be born, for you wouldn't 
be dead. Yet there would be no Priestess of the Tombs, and the dances of the dark of the moon would 
not be danced, and the sacrifices would not be made, and the blood not poured out, and the worship of 
the Dark Ones could be forgotten, forever. She and her Lord would like it to be so." 
"_They_ would set me free, Manan." 
"Not while they are wrathful at you, little mistress," Manan whispered. 
"Wrathful?" 

 "Because of him... The sacrilege not paid for. Oh little one, little one! They do not forgive!" 
She sat in the dust of the lowest step, her head bowed. She looked at a tiny thing that she held on 
her palm, the minute skull of a mouse. The owls in the rafters over the Throne stirred a little; it was 
darkening towards night. 
"Do not go down into the Labyrinth tonight," Manan said very low. "Go to your house, and sleep. 
In the morning go to Kossil, and tell her that you lift the curse from her. And that will be all. You need 
not worry. I will show her proof." 
"Proof?" 
"That the sorcerer is dead." 
She sat still. Slowly she closed her hand, and the fragile skull cracked and collapsed. When she 
opened her hand it held nothing but splinters of bone and dust. 
"No," she said. She brushed the dust from her palm. 
"He must die. He has put a spell on you. You are lost, Arha!" 
"He has not put any spell on me. You're old and cowardly, Manan; you're frightened by old women. 
How do you think you'd come to him and kill him and get your `proof'? Do you know the way clear to 
the Great Treasure, that you followed in the dark last night? Can you count the turnings and come to the 
steps, and then the pit, and then the door? Can you unlock that door?... Oh, poor old Manan, your wits 
are all thick. She has frightened you. You go down to the Small House now, and sleep, and forget all 
these things. Don't worry me forever with talk of death... I'll come later. Go on, go on, old fool, old 
lump." She had risen, and gently pushed Manan's broad chest, patting him and pushing him to go. "Good 
night, good night!" 
He turned, heavy with reluctance and foreboding, but obedient, and trudged down the long hall 
under the columns and the ruined roof. She watched him go. 
When he had been gone some while she turned and went around the dais of the Throne, and 
vanished into the dark behind it. 
------ 
The Ring of Erreth-Akbe 
------ 
In the Great Treasury of the Tombs of Atuan, time did not pass. No light; no life; no least stir of 
spider in the dust or worm in the cold earth. Rock, and dark, and time not passing. 
On the stone lid of a great chest the thief from the Inner Lands lay stretched on his back like the 
carven figure on a tomb. The dust disturbed by his movements had settled on his clothes. He did not 
move. 
The lock of the door rattled. The door opened. Light broke the dead black and a fresher draft stirred 
the dead air. The man lay inert. 
Arha closed the door and locked it from within, set her lantern on a chest, and slowly approached 
the motionless figure. She moved timorously, and her eyes were wide, the pupils still fully dilated from 
her long journey through the dark. 

 "Sparrowhawk!" 
She touched his shoulder, and spoke his name again, and yet again. 
He stirred then, and moaned. At last he sat up, face drawn and eyes blank. He looked at her 
unrecognizing. 
"It's I, Arha- Tenar. I brought you water. Here, drink." 
He fumbled for the flask as if his hands were numb, and drank, but not deeply. 
"How long has it been?" he asked, speaking with difficulty. 
"Two days have passed since you came to this room. This is the third night. I couldn't come earlier. 
I had to steal the food -here it is-" She got out one of the flat gray loaves from the bag she had brought, 
but he shook his head. 
"I'm not hungry. This... this is a deathly place." He put his head in his hands and sat unmoving. 
"Are you cold? I brought the cloak from the Painted Room." 
He did not answer. 
She put the cloak down and stood gazing at him. She was trembling a little, and her eyes were still 
black and wide. 
All at once she sank down on her knees, bowed over, and began to cry, with deep sobs that 
wrenched her body, but brought no tears. 
He got down stiffly from the chest, and bent over her. "Tenar-" 
"I am not Tenar. I am not Arha. The gods are dead, the gods are dead." 
He laid his hands on her head, pushing back the hood. He began to speak. His voice was soft, and 
the words were in no tongue she had ever heard. The sound of them came into her heart like rain falling. 
She grew still to listen. 
When she was quiet he lifted her, and set her like a child on the great chest where he had lain. He 
put his hand on hers. 
"Why did you weep, Tenar?" 
"I'll tell you. It doesn't matter what I tell you. You can't do anything. You can't help. You're dying 
too, aren't you? So it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Kossil, the Priestess of the Godking, she was 
always cruel, she kept trying to make me kill you. The way I killed those others. And I would not. What 
right has she? And she defied the Nameless Ones and mocked them, and I set a curse upon her. And 
since then I've been afraid of her, because it's true what Manan said, she doesn't believe in the gods. She 
wants them to be forgotten, and she'd kill me while I slept. So I didn't sleep. I didn't go back to the Small 
House. I stayed in the Hall all last night, in one of the lofts, where the dancing dresses are. Before it was 
light I went down to the Big House and stole some food from the kitchen, and then I came back to the 
Hall and stayed there all day. I was trying to find out what I should do. And tonight... tonight I was so 
tired, I thought I could go to a holy place and go to sleep, she might be afraid to come there. So I came 
down to the Undertomb. That great cave where I first saw you. And... and she was there. She must have 
come in by the red rock door. She was there with a lantern. Scratching in the grave that Manan dug, to 
see if there was a corpse in it. Like a rat in a graveyard, a great fat black rat, digging. And the light 
burning in the Holy Place, the dark place. And the Nameless Ones did nothing. They didn't kill her or 
drive her mad. They are old, as she said. They are dead. They are all gone. I am not a priestess any 
more." 
The man stood listening, his band still on hers, his head a little bent. Some vigor had come back 
into his face and stance, though the scars on his cheek showed livid gray, and there was dust yet on his 

clothes and hair. 
"I went past her, through the Undertomb. Her candle made more shadows than light, and she didn't 
hear me. I wanted to go into the Labyrinth to get away from her. But when I was in it I kept thinking that 
I heard her following me. All through the corridors I kept hearing somebody behind me. And I didn't 
know where to go. I thought I would be safe here, I thought my Masters would protect me and defend 
me. But they don't, they are gone, they are dead..." 
"It was for them you wept -for their death? But they are here, Tenar, here!" 
"How should you know?" she said listlessly. 
"Because every instant since I set foot in the cavern under the Tombstones, I have striven to keep 
them still, to keep them unaware. All my skills have gone to that, I have spent my strength on it. I have 
filled these tunnels with an endless net of spells, spells of sleep, of stillness, of concealment, and yet still 
they are aware of me, half aware; half sleeping, half awake. And even so I am all but worn out, striving 
against them. This is a most terrible place. One man alone has no hope, here. I was dying of thirst when 
you gave me water, yet it was not the water alone that saved me. It was the strength of the hands that 
gave it." As he said that, he turned her hand palm upward in his own for a moment, gazing at it; then he 
turned away, walked a few steps about the room, and stopped again before her. She said nothing. 
"Did you truly think them dead? You know better in your heart. They do not die. They are dark and 
undying, and they hate the light: the brief, bright light of our mortality. They are immortal, but they are 
not gods. They never were. They are not worth the worship of any human soul." 
She listened, her eyes heavy, her gaze fixed on the flickering lantern. 
"What have they ever given you, Tenar?" 
"Nothing," she whispered. 
"They have nothing to give. They have no power of making. All their power is to darken and 
destroy. They cannot leave this place; they are this place; and it should be left to them. They should not 
be denied nor forgotten, but neither should they be worshiped. The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and 
kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the 
green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, 
and there is cruelty in men's eyes. And where men worship these things and abase themselves before 
them, there evil breeds; there places are made in the world where darkness gathers, places given over 
wholly to the Ones whom we call Nameless, the ancient and holy Powers of the Earth before the Light, 
the powers of the dark, of ruin, of madness... I think they drove your priestess Kossil mad a long time 
ago; I think she has prowled these caverns as she prowls the labyrinth of her own self, and now she 
cannot see the daylight any more. She tells you that the Nameless Ones are dead; only a lost soul, lost to 
truth, could believe that. They exist. But they are not your Masters. They never were. You are free, 
Tenar. You were taught to be a slave, but you have broken free." 
She listened, though her expression did not change. He said no more. They were silent; but it was 
not the silence that had been in that room before she entered. There was the breathing of two of them 
now, and the movement of life in their veins, and the burning of the candle in its lantern of tin, a tiny, 
lively sound. 
"How is it that you know my name?" 
He walked up and down the room, stirring up the fine dust, stretching his arms and shoulders in an 
effort to shake off the numbing chill. 
"Knowing names is my job. My art. To weave the magic of a thing, you see, one must find its true 

name out. In my lands we keep our true names hidden all our lives long, from all but those whom we 
trust utterly; for there is great power, and great peril, in a name. Once, at the beginning of time, when 
Segoy raised the isles of Earthsea from the ocean deeps, all things bore their own true names. And all 
doing of magic, all wizardry, hangs still upon the knowledge -the relearning, the remembering- of that 
true and ancient language of the Making. There are spells to learn, of course, ways to use the words; and 
one must know the consequences, too. But what a wizard spends his life at is finding out the names of 
things, and finding out how to find out the names of things." 
"How did you find out mine?" 
He looked at her a moment, a deep clear glance across the shadows between them; he hesitated a 
moment. "I cannot tell you that. You are like a lantern swathed and covered, hidden away in a dark 
place. Yet the light shines; they could not put out the light. They could not hide you. As I know the light, 
as I know you, I know your name, Tenar. That is my gift, my power. I cannot tell you more. But tell me 
this: what will you do now?" 
"I don't know." 
"Kossil has found an empty grave, by now. What will she do?" 
"I don't know. If I go back up, she can have me killed. It is death for a High Priestess to lie. She 
could have me sacrificed on the steps of the Throne if she wanted. And Manan would have to really cut 
off my head this time, instead of just lifting the sword and waiting for the Dark figure to stop it. But this 
time it wouldn't stop. It would come down and cut off my head." 
Her voice was dull and slow. He frowned. "If we stay here long," he said, "you are going to go 
mad, Tenar. The anger of the Nameless Ones is heavy on your mind. And on mine. It's better now that 
you're here, much better. But it was a long time before you came, and I've used up most of my strength. 
No one can withstand the Dark Ones long alone. They are very strong." He stopped; his voice had sunk 
low, and he seemed to have lost the thread of his speech. He rubbed his hands over his forehead, and 
presently went to drink again from the flask. He broke off a hunch of bread and sat down on the chest 
opposite to eat it. 
What he said was true; she felt a weight, a pressure on her mind, that seemed to darken and confuse 
all thought and feeling. Yet she was not terrified, as she had been coming through the corridors alone. 
Only the utter silence outside the room seemed terrible. Why was that? She had never feared the silence 
of the underearth before. But never before had she disobeyed the Nameless Ones, never had she set 
herself against them. 
She gave a little whimpering laugh at last. "Here we sit on the greatest treasure of the Empire," she 
said. "The God-king would give all his wives to have one chest of it. And we haven't even opened a lid 
to look." 
"I did," said the Sparrowhawk, chewing. 
"In the dark?" 
"I made a little light. The werelight. It was hard to do, here. Even with my staff it would have been 
hard, and without it, it was like trying to light a fire with wet wood in the rain. But it came at last. And I 
found what I was after." 
She raised her face slowly to look at him. "The ring?" 
"The half-ring. You have the other half." 
"I have it? The other half was lost-" 
"And found. I wore it on a chain around my neck. You took it off, and asked me if I couldn't afford 

a better talisman. The only talisman better than half the Ring of Erreth-Akbe would be the whole. But 
then, as they say, half a loaf's better than none. So you now have my half, and I have yours." He smiled 
at her across the shadows of the tomb. 
"You said, when I took it, that I didn't know what to do with it." 
"That was true." 
"And you do know?" 
He nodded. 
"Tell me. Tell me what it is, the ring, and how you came upon the lost half, and how you came 
here, and why. All this I must know, then maybe I will see what to do." 
"Maybe you will. Very well. What is it, the Ring of Erreth-Akbe? Well, you can see that it's not 
precious looking, and it's not even a ring. It's too big. An armring, perhaps, yet it seems too small for 
that. No man knows who it was made for. Elfarran the Fair wore it once, before the Isle of Solea was 
lost beneath the sea; and it was old when she wore it. And at last it came into the hands of Erreth-Akbe... 
The metal is hard silver, pierced with nine holes. There's a design like waves scratched on the outside, 
and nine Runes of Power on the inside. The half you have bears four runes and a bit of another; and 
mine likewise. The break came right across that one symbol, and destroyed it. It is what's been called, 
since then, the Lost Rune. The other eight are known to Mages: Pirr that protects from madness and 
from wind and fire, Ges that gives endurance, and so on. But the broken rune was the one that bound the 
lands. It was the Bond-Rune, the sign of dominion, the sign of peace. No king could rule well if he did 
not rule beneath that sign. No one knows how it was written. Since it was lost there have been no great 
kings in Havnor. There have been princes and tyrants, and wars and quarreling among all the lands of 
Earthsea. 
"So the wise lords and Mages of the Archipelago wanted the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, that they might 
restore the lost rune. But at last they gave up sending men out to seek it, since none could take the one 
half from the Tombs of Atuan, and the other half, which Erreth-Akbe gave to a Kargish king, was lost 
long since. They said there was no use in the search. That was many hundred years ago. 
"Now I come into it thus. When I was a little older than you are now, I was on a... chase, a kind of 
hunt across the sea. That which I hunted tricked me, so that I was cast up on a desert isle, not far off the 
coasts of Karego-At and Atuan, south and west of here. It was a little islet, not much more than a 
sandbar, with long grassy dunes down the middle, and a spring of salty water, and nothing else. 
"Yet two people lived there. An old man and woman; brother and sister, I think. They were terrified 
of me. They had not seen any other human face for- how long? Years, tens of years. But I was in need, 
and they were kind to me. They had a but of driftwood, and a fire. The old woman gave me food, 
mussels she pulled from the rocks at low tide, dried meat of seabirds they killed by throwing stones. She 
was afraid of me, but she gave me food. Then when I did nothing to frighten her, she came to trust me, 
and she showed me her treasure. She had a treasure, too... It was a little dress. All of silk stuff, with 
pearls. A little child's dress, a princess' dress. She was wearing uncured sealskin. 
"We couldn't talk. I didn't know the Kargish tongue then, and they knew no language of the 
Archipelago, and little enough of their own. They must have been brought there as young children, and 
left to die. I don't know why, and doubt that they knew. They knew nothing but the island, the wind, and 
the sea. But when I left she gave me a present. She gave me the lost half of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe." 
He paused for a while. 
"I didn't know it for what it was, no more than she did. The greatest gift of this age of the world, 

and it was given by a poor old foolish woman in sealskins to a silly lout who stuffed it into his pocket 
and said `Thanks!' and sailed off... Well, so I went on, and did what I had to do. And then other things 
came up, and I went to the Dragons' Run, westward, and so on. But all the time I kept the thing with me, 
because I felt a gratitude towards that old woman who had given me the only present she had to give. I 
put a chain through one of the holes pierced in it, and wore it, and never thought about it. And then one 
day on Selidor, the Farthest Isle, the land where Erreth-Akbe died in his battle with the dragon Orm-on 
Selidor I spoke with a dragon, one of that lineage of Orm. He told me what I wore upon my breast. 
"He thought it very funny that I hadn't known. Dragons think we are amusing. But they remember 
Erreth-Akbe; him they speak of as if he were a dragon, not a man. 
"When I came back to the Inmost Isles, I went at last to Havnor. I was born on Gont, which lies not 
far west of your Kargish lands, and I had wandered a good deal since, but I had never been to Havnor. It 
was time to go there. I saw the white towers, and spoke with the great men, the merchants and the 
princes and the lords of the ancient domains. I told them what I had. I told them that if they liked, I 
would go seek the rest of the ring in the Tombs of Atuan, in order to find the Lost Rune, the key to 
peace. For we need peace sorely in the world. They were full of praise; and one of them even gave me 
money to provision my boat. So I learned your tongue, and came to Atuan." 
He fell silent, gazing before him into the shadows. 
"Didn't the people in our towns know you for a Westerner, by your skin, by your speech?" 
"Oh, it's easy to fool people," he said rather absently, "if you know the tricks. You make some 
illusion-changes, and nobody but another Mage will see through them. And you have no wizards or 
Mages here in the Kargish lands. That's a queer thing. You banished all your wizards long ago, and 
forbade the practice of the Art Magic; and now you scarcely believe in it." 
"I was taught to disbelieve in it. It is contrary to the teachings of the Priest Kings. But I know that 
only sorcery could have got you to the Tombs, and in at the door of red rock." 
"Not only sorcery, but good advice also. We use writing more than you, I think. Do you know how 
to read?" 
"No. It is one of the black arts." 
He nodded. "But a useful one," he said. "An ancient unsuccessful thief left certain descriptions of 
the Tombs of Atuan, and instructions for entering, if one were able to use one of the Great Spells of 
Opening. All this was written down in a book in the treasury of a prince of Havnor. He let me read it. So 
I got as far as the great cavern-" 
"The Undertomb." 
"The thief who wrote the way to enter thought that the treasure was there, in the Undertomb. So I 
looked there, but I had the feeling that it must be better hidden, farther on in the maze. I knew the 
entrance to the Labyrinth, and when I saw you, I went to it, thinking to hide in the maze and search it. 
That was a mistake, of course. The Nameless Ones had hold of me already, bewildering my mind. And 
since then I have grown only weaker and stupider. One must not submit to them, one must resist, keep 
one's spirit always strong and certain. I learned that a long time ago. But it's hard to do, here, where they 
are so strong. They are not gods, Tenar. But they are stronger than any man." 
They were both silent for a long time. 
"What else did you find in the treasure chests?" she asked dully. 
"Rubbish. Gold, jewels, crowns, swords. Nothing to which any man alive has any claim... Tell me 
this, Tenar. How were you chosen to be the Priestess of the Tombs?" 

 "When the First Priestess dies they go looking all through Atuan for a girl-baby born on the night 
the Priestess died. And they always find one. Because it is the Priestess reborn. When the child is five 
they bring it here to the Place. And when it is six it is given to the Dark Ones and its soul is eaten by 
them. And so it belongs to them, and has belonged to them since the beginning days. And it has no 
name." 
"Do you believe that?" 
"I have always believed it." 
"Do you believe it now?" 
She said nothing. 
Again the shadowy silence fell between them. After a long time she said, "Tell me... tell me about 
the dragons in the West." 
"Tenar, what will you do? We can't sit here telling each other tales until the candle burns out, and 
the darkness comes again." 
"I don't know what to do. I am afraid." She sat erect on the stone chest, her hands clenched one in 
the other, and spoke loudly, like one in pain. She said, "I am afraid of the dark." 
He answered softly. "You must make a choice. Either you must leave me, lock the door, go up to 
your altars and give me to your Masters; then go to the Priestess Kossil and make your peace with her - 
and that is the end of the story- or, you must unlock the door, and go out of it, with me. Leave the 
Tombs, leave Atuan, and come with me oversea. And that is the beginning of the story. You must be 
Arha, or you must be Tenar. You cannot be both." 
The deep voice was gentle and certain. She looked through the shadows into his face, which was 
hard and scarred, but had in it no cruelty, no deceit. 
"If I leave the service of the Dark Ones, they will kill me. If I leave this place I will die." 
"You will not die. Arha will die." 
"I cannot..." 
"To be reborn one must die, Tenar. It is not so hard as it looks from the other side." 
"They would not let us get out. Ever." 
"Perhaps not. Yet it's worth trying. You have knowledge, and I have skill, and between us we 
have..." He paused. 
"We have the Ring of Erreth-Akbe." 
"Yes, that. But I thought also of another thing between us. Call it trust... That is one of its names. It 
is a very great thing. Though each of us alone is weak, having that we are strong, stronger than the 
Powers of the Dark." His eyes were clear and bright in his scarred face. "Listen, Tenar!" he said. "I came 
here a thief, an enemy, armed against you; and you showed me mercy, and trusted me. And I have 
trusted you from the first time I saw your face, for one moment in the cave beneath the Tombs, beautiful 
in darkness. You have proved your trust in me. I have made no return. I will give you what I have to 
give. My true name is Ged. And this is yours to keep." He had risen, and he held out to her a semicircle 
of pierced and carven silver. "Let the ring be rejoined," he said. 
She took it from his hand. She slipped from her neck the silver chain on which the other half was 
strung, and took it off the chain. She laid the two pieces in her palm so that the broken edges met, and it 
looked whole. 
She did not raise her face. 
"I will come with you," she said. 

------ 
The Anger of the Dark 
------ 
When she said that, the man named Ged put his hand over hers that held the broken talisman. She 
looked up startled, and saw him flushed with life and triumph, smiling. She was dismayed and 
frightened of him "You have set us both free," he said. "Alone, no one wins freedom. Come, let's waste 
no time while we still have time! Hold it out again, for a little." She had closed her fingers over the 
pieces of silver, but at his request she held them out again on her hand, the broken edges touching. 
He did not take them, but put his fingers on them. He said a couple of words, and sweat suddenly 
sprang out on his face. She felt a queer little tremor on the palm of her hand, as if a small animal 
sleeping there had moved. Ged sighed; his tense stance relaxed, and he wiped his forehead. 
"There," he said, and picking up the Ring of Erreth-Akbe he slid it over the fingers of her right 
hand, narrowly over the breadth of the hand, and up onto the wrist. "There!" and he regarded it with 
satisfaction. "It fits. It must be a woman's arm-ring, or a child's." 
"Will it hold?' she murmured, nervously, feeling the strip of silver slip cold and delicate on her thin 
arm. 
"It will. I couldn't put a mere mending charm on the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, like a village witch 
mending a kettle. I had to use a Patterning, and make it whole. It is whole now as if it had never been 
broken. Tenar, we must be gone. I'll bring the bag and flask. Wear your cloak. Is there anything more?" 
As she fumbled at the door, unlocking it, he said, "I wish I had my staff," and she replied, still 
whispering, "It's just outside the door. I brought it." 
"Why did you bring it?" he asked curiously. 
"I thought of... taking you to the door. Letting you go "That was a choice you didn't have. You 
could keep me a slave, and be a slave; or set me free, and come free with me. Come, little one, take 
courage, turn the key." 
She turned the dragon-hafted key and opened the door on the low, black corridor. She went out of 
the Treasury of the Tombs with the ring of Erreth-Akbe on her arm, and the man followed her. 
There was a low vibration, not quite a noise, in the rock of the walls and floor and vaulting. It was 
like distant thunder, like something huge falling a great way off. 
The hair on her head rose up, and without stopping to reason she blew out the candle in the tin 
lantern. She heard the man move behind her; his quiet voice said, so close that his breath stirred her hair, 
"Leave the lantern. I can make light if need be. What time is it, outside?" 
"Long past midnight when I came here." 
"We must go forward then." 
But he did not move. She realized that she must lead him. Only she knew the way out of the 
Labyrinth, and he waited to follow her. She set out, stooping because the tunnel here was so low, but 
keeping a pretty good pace. From unseen cross-passages came a cold breath and a sharp, dank odor, the 
lifeless smell of the huge hollowness beneath them. When the passage grew a little higher and she could 

stand upright, she went slower, counting her steps as they approached the pit. Lightfooted, aware of all 
her movements, he followed a short way behind her. The instant she stopped, he stopped. 
"Here's the pit," she whispered. "I can't find the ledge. No, here. Be careful, I think the stones are 
coming loose... No, no, wait -it's loose-" She sidled back to safety as the stones teetered under her feet. 
The man caught her arm and held her. Her heart pounded. "The ledge isn't safe, the stones are coming 
loose." 
"I'll make a little light, and look at them. Maybe I can mend them with the right word. It's all right, 
little one." 
She thought how strange it was that he called her what Manan had always called her. And as he 
kindled a faint glow on the end of his staff, like the glow on rotting wood or a star behind fog, and 
stepped out onto the narrow way beside the black abyss, she saw the bulk looming in the farther dark 
beyond him, and knew it for Manan. But her voice was caught in her throat as in a noose, and she could 
not cry out. 
As Manan reached out to push him off his shaky perch into the pit beside him, Ged looked up, saw 
him, and with a shout of surprise or rage struck out at him with the staff. At the shout the light blazed up 
white and intolerable, straight in the eunuch's face. Manan flung up one of his big hands to shield his 
eyes, lunged desperately to catch hold of Ged, and missed, and fell. 
He made no cry as he fell. No sound came up out of the black pit, no sound of his body hitting the 
bottom, no sound of his death, none at all. Clinging perilously to the ledge, kneeling frozen at the lip, 
Ged and Tenar did not move; listened; heard nothing. 
The light was gray wisp, barely visible. 
"Come!" Ged said, holding out his hand; she took it, and in three bold steps he brought her across. 
He quenched the light. She went ahead of him again to lead the way. She was quite numb and did not 
think of anything. Only after some time she thought, Is it right or left? 
She stopped. 
Halted a few steps behind her, he said softly, "What is it?" 
"I am lost. Make the light." 
"Lost?" 
"I have... I have lost count of the turnings." 
"I kept count," he said, coming a little closer. "A left turn after the pit; then a right, and a right 
again." 
"Then the next will be right again," she said automatically, but she did not move. "Make the light." 
"The light won't show us the way, Tenar." 
"Nothing will. It is lost. We are lost." 
The dead silence closed in upon her whisper, ate it. 
She felt the movement and warmth of the other, close to her in the cold dark. He sought her hand 
and took it. "Go on, Tenar. The next turn to the right." 
"Make a light," she pleaded. "The tunnels twist so..." 
"I cannot. I have no strength to spare. Tenar, they are- They know that we left the Treasury. They 
know that we're past the pit. They are seeking us, seeking our will, our spirit. To quench it, to devour it. 
I must keep that alight. All my strength is going into that. I must withstand them; with you. With your 
help. We must go on." 
"There is no way out," she said, but she took one step forward. Then she took another, hesitant as if 

beneath each step the black hollow void gaped open, the emptiness under the earth. The warm, hard grip 
of his hand was on her hand. They went forward. 
After what seemed a long time they came to the flight of steps. It had not seemed so steep before, 
the steps hardly more than slimy notches in the rock. But they climbed it, and then went on a little more 
rapidly, for she knew that the curving passage went a long way without side turnings after the steps. Her 
fingers, trailing the left-hand wall for guidance, crossed a gap, an opening to the left. "Here," she 
murmured; but he seemed to hold back, as if something in her movements made him doubtful. 
"No," she muttered in confusion, "not this, it's the next turn to the left. I don't know. I can't do it. 
There's no way out." 
"We are going to the Painted Room," the quiet voice said in the darkness. "How should we go 
there?" 
"The left turn after this." 
She led on. They made the long circuit, past two false leads, to the passage that branched 
rightwards towards the Painted Room. 
"Straight on," she whispered, and now the long unraveling of the darkness went better, for she 
knew these passages towards the iron door and had counted their turns a hundred times; the strange 
weight that lay upon her mind could not confuse her about them, if she did not try to think. But all the 
time they were getting nearer and nearer to that which weighed upon her and pressed against her; and 
her legs were so tired and heavy that she whimpered once or twice with the labor of making them move. 
And beside her the man would breathe deep, and hold the breath, again and again, like one making a 
mighty effort with all the strength of his body. Sometimes his voice broke out, hushed and sharp, in a 
word or fragment of a word. So they came at last to the iron door; and in sudden terror she put out her 
hand. 
The door was open. 
"Quick!" she said, and pulled her companion through. Then, on the further side, she halted. 
"Why was it open?" she said. 
"Because your Masters need your hands to shut it for them." 
"We are coming to..." Her voice failed her. 
"To the center of the darkness. I know. Yet we're out of the Labyrinth. What ways out of the 
Undertomb are there?" 
"Only one. The door you entered doesn't open from within. The way goes through the cavern and 
up passages to a trapdoor in a room behind the Throne. In the Hall of the Throne." 
"Then we must go that way." 
"But she is there," the girl whispered. "There in the Undertomb. In the cavern. Digging in the empty 
grave. I cannot pass her, oh, I cannot pass her again!" 
"She will have gone by now." 
"I cannot go there." 
"Tenar, I hold the roof up over our heads, this moment. I keep the walls from closing in upon us. I 
keep the ground from opening beneath our feet. I have done this since we passed the pit where their 
servant waited. If I can hold off the earthquake, do you fear to meet one human soul with me? Trust me, 
as I have trusted you! Come with me now." 
They went forward. 
The endless tunnel opened out. The sense of a greater air met them, an enlarging of the dark. They 

had entered the great cave beneath the Tombstones. 
They started to circle it, keeping to the right-hand wall. Tenar had gone only a few steps when she 
paused. "What is it?" she murmured, her voice barely passing her lips. There was a noise in the dead, 
vast, black bubble of air: a tremor or shaking, a sound heard by the blood and felt in the bones. The timecarven 
walls beneath her fingers thrummed, thrummed. 
"Go forward," the man's voice said, dry and strained. "Hurry, Tenar." 
As she stumbled forward she cried out in her mind, which was as dark, as shaken as the 
subterranean vault, "Forgive me. O my Masters, O unnamed ones, most ancient ones, forgive me, 
forgive me!" 
There was no answer. There had never been an answer. 
They came to the passage beneath the Hall, climbed the stairs, came to the last steps up and the 
trapdoor at their head. It was shut, as she always left it. She pressed the spring that opened it. It did not 
open. 
"It is broken," she said. "It is locked." 
He came up past her and put his back against the trap. It did not move. 
"It's not locked, but held down by something heavy." 
"Can you open it?" 
"Perhaps. I think she'll be waiting there. Has she men with her?" 
"Duby and Uahto, maybe other wardens -men cannot come there-" 
"I can't make a spell of opening, and hold off the people waiting up there, and withstand the will of 
the darkness, all at one time," said his steady voice, considering. "We must try the other door then, the 
door in the rocks, by which I came in. She knows that it can't be opened from within?" 
"She knows. She let me try it once." 
"Then she may discount it. Come. Come, Tenar!" 
She had sunk down on the stone steps, which hummed and shivered as if a great bowstring were 
being plucked in the depths beneath them. 
"What is it- the shaking?" 
"Come," he said, so steady and certain that she obeyed, and crept back down the passages and 
stairs, back to the dreadful cavern. 
At the entrance so great a weight of blind and dire hatred came pressing down upon her, like the 
weight of the earth itself, that she cowered and without knowing it cried out aloud, "They are here! They 
are here!" 
"Then let them know that we are here," the man said, and from his staff and hands leapt forth a 
white radiance that broke as a seawave breaks in sunlight, against the thousand diamonds of the roof and 
walls: a glory of light, through which the two fled, straight across the great cavern, their shadows racing 
from them into the white traceries and the glittering crevices and the empty, open grave. To the low 
doorway they ran, down the tunnel, stooping over, she first, he following. There in the tunnel the rocks 
boomed, and moved under their feet. Yet the light was with them still, dazzling. As she saw the dead 
rock-face before her, she heard over the thundering of the earth his voice speaking one word, and as she 
fell to her knees his staff struck down, over her head, against the red rock of the shut door. The rocks 
burned white as if afire, and burst asunder. 
Outside them was the sky, paling to dawn. A few white stars lay high and cool within it. 
Tenar saw the stars and felt the sweet wind on her face; but she did not get up. She crouched on 

hands and knees there between the earth and sky. 
The man, a strange dark figure in that half-light before the dawn, turned and pulled at her arm to 
make her get up. His face was black and twisted like a demon's. She cowered away from him, shrieking 
in a thick voice not her own, as if a dead tongue moved in her mouth, "No! No! Don't touch me -leave 
me- Go!" And she writhed back away from him, into the crumbling, lipless mouth of the Tombs. 
His hard grip loosened. He said in a quiet voice, "By the bond you wear I bid you come, Tenar." 
She saw the starlight on the silver of the ring on her arm. Her eyes on that, she rose, staggering. She 
put her hand in his, and came with him. She could not run. They walked down the hill. From the black 
mouth among the rocks behind them issued forth a long, long, groaning howl of hatred and lament. 
Stones fell about them. The ground quivered. They went on, she with her eyes still fixed on the glimmer 
of starlight on her wrist. 
They were in the dim valley westward of the Place. Now they began to climb; and all at once he 
bade her turn. "See-" 
She turned, and saw. They were across the valley, on a level now with the Tombstones, the nine 
great monoliths that stood or lay above the cavern of diamonds and graves. The stones that stood were 
moving. They jerked, and leaned slowly like the masts of ships. One of them seemed to twitch and rise 
taller; then a shudder went through it, and it fell. Another fell, smashing crossways on the first. Behind 
them the low dome of the Hall of the Throne, black against the yellow light in the east, quivered. The 
walls bulged. The whole great ruinous mass of stone and masonry changed shape like clay in running 
water, sank in upon itself, and with a roar and sudden storm of splinters and dust slid sideways and 
collapsed. The earth of the valley rippled and bucked; a kind of wave ran up the hillside, and a huge 
crack opened among the Tombstones, gaping on the blackness underneath, oozing dust like gray smoke. 
The stones that still stood upright toppled into it and were swallowed. Then with a crash that seemed to 
echo off the sky itself, the raw black lips of the crack closed together; and the hills shook once, and grew 
still. 
She looked from the horror of earthquake to the man beside her, whose face she had never seen by 
daylight. "You held it back," she said, and her voice piped like the wind in a reed, after that mighty 
bellowing and crying of the earth. "You held back the earthquake, the anger of the dark." 
"We must go on," he said, turning away from the sunrise and the ruined Tombs. "I am tired, I am 
cold..." He stumbled as they went, and she took his arm. Neither could go faster than a dragging walk. 
Slowly, like two tiny spiders on a great wall, they toiled up the immense slope of the hill, until at the top 
they stood on dry ground yellowed by the rising sun and streaked with the long, sparse shadows of the 
sage. Before them the western mountains stood, their feet purple, their upper slopes gold. The two 
paused a moment, then passed over the crest of the hill, out of sight of the Place of the Tombs, and were 
gone. 
------ 
The Western Mountains 
------ 

 Tenar woke, struggling up from bad dreams, out of places where she had walked so long that all the 
flesh had fallen from her and she could see the double white bones of her arms glimmer faintly in the 
dark. She opened her eyes to a golden light, and smelled the pungency of sage. A sweetness came into 
her as she woke, a pleasure that filled her slowly and wholly till it overflowed, and she sat up, stretching 
her arms out from the black sleeves of her robe, and looked about her in unquestioning delight. 
It was evening. The sun was down behind the mountains that loomed close and high to westward, 
but its afterglow filled all earth and sky: a vast, clear, wintry sky, a vast, barren, golden land of 
mountains and wide valleys. The wind was down. It was cold, and absolutely silent. Nothing moved. 
The leaves of the sagebushes nearby were dry and gray, the stalks of tiny dried-up desert herbs prickled 
her hand. The huge silent glory of light burned on every twig and withered leaf and stem, on the hills, in 
the air. 
She looked to her left and saw the man lying on the desert ground, his cloak pulled round him, one 
arm under his head, fast asleep. His face in sleep was stern, almost frowning; but his left hand lay 
relaxed on the dirt, beside a small thistle that still bore its ragged cloak of gray fluff and its tiny defense 
of spikes and spines. The man and the small desert thistle; the thistle and the sleeping man... 
He was one whose power was akin to, and as strong as, the Old Powers of the earth; one who talked 
with dragons, and held off earthquakes with his word. And there he lay asleep on the dirt, with a little 
thistle growing by his hand. It was very strange. Living, being in the world, was a much greater and 
stranger thing than she had ever dreamed. The glory of the sky touched his dusty hair, and turned the 
thistle gold for a little while. 
The light was slowly fading. As it did so, the cold seemed to grow intenser minute by minute. 
Tenar got up and began to gather dry sagebrush, picking up fallen twigs, breaking off the tough branches 
that grew as gnarled and massive, in their scale, as the limbs of oaks. They had stopped here about noon, 
when it was warm, and they could go no farther for weariness. A couple of stunted junipers, and the 
westward slope of the ridge they had just descended, had offered shelter enough; they had drunk a little 
water from the flask, and lain down, and gone to sleep. 
There was a litter of larger branches under the little trees, which she gathered. Scooping out a pit in 
an angle of earth-embedded rocks, she built up a fire, and lit it with her flint and steel. The tinder of sage 
leaves and twigs caught at once. Dry branches bloomed into rosy flame, scented with resin. Now it 
seemed quite dark, all around the fire; and the stars were coming out again in the tremendous sky. 
The snap and crack of the flames roused the sleeper. He sat up, rubbing his hands over his grimy 
face, and at last got up stiffly and came close to the fire. 
"I wonder-" he said sleepily. 
"I know, but we can't last the night here without a fire. It gets too cold." After a minute she added, 
"Unless you have some magic that would keep us warm, or that would hide the fire..." 
He sat down by the fire, his feet almost in it, his arms round his knees. "Brr," he said. "A fire is 
much better than magic. I've put a little illusion about us here; if someone comes by, we might look like 
sticks and stones to him. What do you think? Will they be following us?" 
"I fear it, yet I don't think they will. No one but Kossil knew of your being there. Kossil, and 
Manan. And they are dead. Surely she was in the Hall when it fell. She was waiting at the trapdoor. And 
the others, the rest, they must think that I was in the Hall or the Tombs, and was crushed in the 
earthquake." She too put her arms round her knees, and shuddered. "I hope the other buildings didn't fall. 
It was hard to see from the hill, there was so much dust. Surely all the temples and houses didn't fall, the 

Big House where all the girls sleep." 
"I think not. It was the Tombs that devoured themselves. I saw a gold roof of some temple as we 
turned away; it still stood. And there were figures down the hill, people running." 
"What will they say, what will they think... Poor Penthe! She might have to become the High 
Priestess of the Godking now. And it was always she who wanted to run away. Not I. Maybe now she'll 
run away." Tenar smiled. There was a joy in her that no thought nor dread could darken, that same sure 
joy that had risen in her, waking in the golden light. She opened her bag and took out two small, flat 
loaves; she handed one across the fire to Ged, and bit into the other. The bread was tough, and sour, and 
very good to eat. 
They munched together in silence awhile. 
"How far are we from the sea?" 
"It took me two nights and two days coming. It'll take us longer going." 
"I'm strong," she said. 
"You are. And valiant. But your companion's tired," he said with a smile. "And we haven't any too 
much bread." 
"Will we find water?" 
"Tomorrow, in the mountains." 
"Can you find food for us?" she asked, rather vaguely and timidly. 
"Hunting takes time, and weapons." 
"I meant, with, you know, spells." 
"I can call a rabbit," he said, poking the fire with a twisted stick of juniper. "The rabbits are coming 
out of their holes all around us, now. Evening's their time. I could call one by name, and he'd come. But 
would you catch and skin and broil a rabbit that you'd called to you thus? Perhaps if you were starving. 
But it would be a breaking of trust, I think." 
"Yes. I thought, perhaps you could just... 
"Summon up a supper," he said. "Oh, I could. On golden plates, if you like. But that's illusion, and 
when you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before. It's about as nourishing as eating your own 
words." She saw his white teeth flash a moment in the firelight. 
"Your magic is peculiar," she said, with a little dignity of equals, Priestess addressing Mage. "It 
appears to be useful only for large matters." 
He laid more wood on the fire, and it flared up in a juniperscented fireworks of sparks and crackles. 
"Can you really call a rabbit?" Tenar inquired suddenly. 
"Do you want me to?" 
She nodded. 
He turned away from the fire and said softly into the immense and starlit dark, "Kebbo... O kebbo..." 
Silence. No sound. No motion. Only presently, at the very edge of the flickering firelight, a round 
eye like a pebble of jet, very near the ground. A curve of furry back; an ear, long, alert, upraised. 
Ged spoke again. The ear flicked, gained a sudden partner-ear out of the shadow; then as the little 
beast turned Tenar saw it entire for an instant, the small, soft, lithe hop of it returning unconcerned to its 
business in the night. 
"Ah!" she said, letting out her breath. "That's lovely." Presently she asked, "Could I do that?" 
"Well-" 
"It is a secret," she said at once, dignified again. 

 "The rabbit's name is a secret. At least, one should not use it lightly, for no reason. But what is not a 
secret, but rather a gift, or a mystery, do you see, is the power of calling." 
"Oh," she said, "that you have. I know!" There was a passion in her voice, not hidden by pretended 
mockery. He looked at her and did not answer. 
He was indeed still worn out by his struggle against the Nameless Ones; he had spent his strength 
in the quaking tunnels. Though he had won, he had little spirit left for exultation. He soon curled up 
again, as near the fire as he could get, and slept. 
Tenar sat feeding the fire and watching the blaze of the winter constellations from horizon to 
horizon until her head grew giddy with splendor and silence, and she dozed off. 
They both woke. The fire was dead. The stars she had watched were now far over the mountains 
and new ones had risen in the east. It was the cold that woke them, the dry cold of the desert night, the 
wind like a knife of ice. A veil of cloud was coming over the sky from the southwest. 
The gathered firewood was almost gone. "Let's walk," Ged said, "it's not long till dawn." His teeth 
chattered so that she could hardly understand him. They set out, climbing the long slow slope westward. 
The bushes and rocks showed black in starlight, and it was as easy to walk as in the day. After a cold 
first while, the walking warmed them; they stopped crouching and shivering, and began to go easier. So 
by sunrise they were on the first rise of the western mountains, which had walled in Tenar's life till then. 
They stopped in a grove of trees whose golden, quivering leaves still clung to the boughs. He told 
her they were aspens; she knew no trees but juniper, and the sickly poplars by the riversprings, and the 
forty apple trees of the orchard of the Place. A small bird among the aspens said "dee, dee," in a small 
voice. Under the trees ran a stream, narrow but powerful, shouting, muscular over its rocks and falls, too 
hasty to freeze. Tenar was almost afraid of it. She was used to the desert where things are silent and 
move slowly: sluggish rivers, shadows of clouds, vultures circling. 
They divided a piece of bread and a last crumbling bit of cheese for breakfast, rested a little, and 
went on. 
By evening they were up high. It was overcast and windy, freezing weather. They camped in the 
valley of another stream, where there was plenty of wood, and this time built up a sturdy fire of logs by 
which they could keep fairly warm. 
Tenar was happy. She had found a squirrel's cache of nuts, exposed by the falling of a hollow tree: 
a couple of pounds of fine walnuts and a smooth-shelled kind that Ged, not knowing the Kargish name, 
called ubir. She cracked them one by one between a flat stone and a hammerstone, and handed every 
second nutmeat to the man. 
"I wish we could stay here," she said, looking down at the windy, twilit valley between the hills. "I 
like this place." 
"This is a good place," he agreed. 
"People would never come here." 
"Not often... I was born in the mountains," he said, "on the Mountain of Gont. We shall pass it, 
sailing to Havnor, if we take the northern way. It's beautiful to see it in winter, rising all white out of the 
sea, like a greater wave. My village was by just such a stream as this one. Where were you born, Tenar?" 
"In the north of Atuan, in Entat, I think. I can't remember it." 
"They took you so young?" 
"I was five. I remember a fire on a hearth, and... nothing else." 
He rubbed his jaw, which though it had acquired a sparse beard, was at least clean; despite the cold, 

both of them had washed in the mountain streams. He rubbed his jaw and looked thoughtful and severe. 
She watched him, and never could she have said what was in her heart as she watched him, in the 
firelight, in the mountain dusk. 
"What are you going to do in Havnor?" he said, asking the question of the fire, not of her. "You are - 
more than I had realized- truly reborn." 
She nodded, smiling a little. She felt newborn. 
"You should learn the language, at least." 
"Your language?" 
"Yes." 
"I'd like to" 
"Well, then. This is kabat," and he tossed a little stone into the lap of her black robe. 
"Kabat. Is that in the dragon-tongue?" 
"No, no. You don't want to work spells, you want to talk with other men and women!" 
"But what is a pebble in the dragon's tongue?" 
"Tolk," he said. "But I am not making you my apprentice sorcerer. I'm teaching you the language 
people speak in the Archipelago, the Inner Lands. I had to learn your language before I came here." 
"You speak it oddly." 
"No doubt. Now, arkemmi kabat," and he held out his hands for her to give him the pebble. 
"Must I go to Havnor?" she said. 
"Where else would you go, Tenar?" 
She hesitated. 
"Havnor is a beautiful city," he said. "And you bring it the ring, the sign of peace, the lost treasure. 
They'll welcome you in Havnor as a princess. They'll do you honor for the great gift you bring them, and 
bid you welcome, and make you welcome. They are a noble and generous people in that city. They'll call 
you the White Lady because of your fair skin, and they'll love you the more because you are so young. 
And because you are beautiful. You'll have a hundred dresses like the one I showed you by illusion, but 
real ones. You'll meet with praise, and gratitude, and love. You who have known nothing but solitude 
and envy and the dark." 
"There was Manan," she said, defensive, her mouth trembling just a little. "He loved me and was 
kind to me, always. He protected me as well as he knew how, and I killed him for it; he fell into the 
black pit. I don't want to go to Havnor. I don't want to go there. I want to stay here." 
"Here- in Atuan?" 
"In the mountains. Where we are now." 
"Tenar," he said in his grave, quiet voice, "we'll stay then. I haven't my knife, and if it snows it will 
be hard. But so long as we can find food-" 
"No. I know we can't stay. I'm merely being foolish," Tenar said, and got up, scattering walnut 
shells, to lay new wood on the fire. She stood thin and very straight in her torn, dirt-stained gown and 
cloak of black. "All I know is of no use now," she said, "and I haven't learned anything else. I will try to 
learn." 
Ged looked away, wincing as if in pain. 
Next day they crossed the summit of the tawny range. In the pass a hard wind blew, with snow in it, 
stinging and blinding. It was not until they had come down a long way on the other side, out from under 

the snow clouds of the peaks, that Tenar saw the land beyond the mountain wall. It was all green- green 
of pines, of grasslands, of sown fields and fallows. Even in the dead of winter, when the thickets were 
bare and the forests full of gray boughs, it was a green land, humble and mild. They looked down on it 
from a high, rocky slant of the mountainside. Wordless, Ged pointed to the west, where the sun was 
getting low behind a thick cream and roil of clouds. The sun itself was hidden, but there was a glitter on 
the horizon, almost like the dazzle of the crystal walls of the Undertomb, a kind of joyous shimmering 
off on the edge of the world. 
"What is that?" the girl said, and he: "The sea." 
Shortly afterward, she saw a less wonderful thing than that, but wonderful enough. They came on a 
road, and followed it; and it brought them by dusk into a village: ten or a dozen houses strung along the 
road. She looked at her companion in alarm when she realized they were coming among men. She 
looked, and did not see him. Beside her, in Ged's clothing, and with his gait, and in his shoes, strode 
another man. He had a white skin, and no beard. He glanced at her; his eyes were blue. He winked. 
"Will I fool 'em?" he said. "How are your clothes?" 
She looked down at herself. She had on a countrywoman's brown skirt and jacket, and a large red 
woolen shawl. 
"Oh," she said, stopping short. "Oh, you are- you are Ged!" As she said his name she saw him 
perfectly clearly, the dark, scarred face she knew, the dark eyes; yet there stood the milk-faced stranger. 
"Don't say my true name before others. Nor will I say yours. We are brother and sister, come from 
Tenacbah. And I think I'll ask for a bite of supper if I see a kindly face." He took her hand and they 
entered the village. 
They left it next morning with full stomachs, after a pleasant sleep in a hayloft. 
"Do Mages often beg?" asked Tenar, on the road between green fields, where goats and little 
spotted cattle grazed. 
"Why do you ask?" 
"You seemed used to begging. In fact you were good at it." 
"Well, yes. I've begged all my life, if you look at it that way. Wizards don't own much, you know. 
In fact nothing but their staff and clothing, if they wander. They are received and given food and shelter, 
by most people, gladly. They do make some return." 
"What return?" 
"Well, that woman in the village. I cured her goats." 
"What was wrong with them?" 
"They both had infected udders. I used to herd goats when I was a boy." 
"Did you tell her you'd cured them?" 
"No. How could I? Why should I?" 
After a pause she said, "I see your magic is not good only for large things." 
"Hospitality," he said, "kindness to a stranger, that's a very large thing. Thanks are enough, of 
course. But I was sorry for the goats." 
In the afternoon they came by a large town. It was built of clay brick, and walled round in the 
Kargish fashion, with overhanging battlements, watchtowers at the four corners, and a single gate, under 
which drovers were herding a big flock of sheep. The red tile roofs of a hundred or more houses poked 
up over the walls of yellowish brick. At the gate stood two guards in the red-plumed helmets of the 
Godking's service. Tenar had seen men in such helmets come, once a year or so, to the Place, escorting 

offerings of slaves or money to the Godking's temple. When she told Ged that, as they passed by outside 
the walls, he said, "I saw them too, as a boy. They came raiding to Gont. They came into my village, to 
plunder it. But they were driven off. And there was a battle down by Armouth, on the shore; many men 
were killed, hundreds, they say. Well, perhaps now that the ring is rejoined and the Lost Rune remade, 
there will be no more such raiding and killing between the Kargish Empire and the Inner Lands." 
"It would be foolish if such things went on," said Tenar. "What would the Godking ever do with so 
many slaves?" 
Her companion appeared to ponder this awhile. "If the Kargish lands defeated the Archipelago, you 
mean?" 
She nodded. 
"I don't think that would be likely to happen." 
"But look how strong the Empire is- that great city, with its walls, and all its men. How could your 
lands stand against them, if they attacked?' 
"That is not a very big city," he said cautiously and gently. "I too would have thought it 
tremendous, when I was new from my mountain. But there are many, many cities in Earthsea, among 
which this is only a town. There are many, many lands. You will see them, Tenar." 
She said nothing. She trudged along the road, her face set. 
"It is marvelous to see them: the new lands rising from the sea as your boat comes towards them. 
The farmlands and forests, the cities with their harbors and palaces, the marketplaces where they sell 
everything in the world." 
She nodded. She knew he was trying to hearten her, but she had left joy up in the mountains, in the 
twilit valley of the stream. There was a dread in her now that grew and grew. All that lay ahead of her 
was unknown. She knew nothing but the desert and the Tombs. What good was that? She knew the 
turnings of a ruined maze, she knew the dances danced before a fallen altar. She knew nothing of forests, 
or cities, or the hearts of men. 
She said suddenly, "Will you stay with me there?" 
She did not look at him. He was in his illusory disguise, a white-skinned Kargish countryman, and 
she did not like to see him so. But his voice was unchanged, the same voice that had spoken in the 
darkness of the Labyrinth. 
He was slow to answer. "Tenar, I go where I am sent. I follow my calling. It has not yet let me stay 
in any land for long. Do you see that? I do what I must do. Where I go, I must go alone. So long as you 
need me, I'll be with you in Havnor. And if you ever need me again, call me. I will come. I would come 
from my grave if you called me, Tenar! But I cannot stay with you." 
She said nothing. After a while he said, "You will not need me long, there. You will be happy." 
She nodded, accepting, silent. 
They went on side by side towards the sea. 
------ 
Voyage 
------ 

 He had hidden his boat in a cave on the side of a great rocky headland, Cloud Cape it was called by 
the villagers nearby, one of whom gave them a bowl of fish stew for their supper. They made their way 
down the cliffs to the beach in the last light of the gray day. The cave was a narrow crack that went back 
into the rock for about thirty feet; its sandy floor was damp, for it lay just above the high-tide mark. Its 
opening was visible from sea, and Ged said they should not light a fire lest the night-fishermen out in 
their small craft along shore should see it and be curious. So they lay miserably on the sand, which 
seemed so soft between the fingers and was rock-hard to the tired body. And Tenar listened to the sea, a 
few yards below the cave mouth, crashing and sucking and booming on the rocks, and the thunder of it 
down the beach eastward for miles. Over and over and over it made the same sounds, yet never quite the 
same. It never rested. On all the shores of all the lands in all the world, it heaved itself in these unresting 
waves, and never ceased, and never was still. The desert, the mountains: they stood still. They did not 
cry out forever in a great, dull voice. The sea spoke forever, but its language was foreign to her. She did 
not understand. 
In the first gray light, when the tide was low, she roused from uneasy sleep and saw the wizard go 
out of the cave. She watched him walk, barefoot and with belted cloak, on the black-haired rocks below, 
seeking something. He came back, darkening the cave as he entered. "Here," he said, holding out a 
handful of wet, hideous things like purple rocks and orange lips. 
"What are they?" 
"Mussels, off the rocks. And those two are oysters, even better. Look- like this." With the little 
dagger from her keyring, which she had lent him up in the mountains, he opened a shell and ate the 
orange mussel with seawater as its sauce. 
"You don't even cook it? You ate it alive!" 
She would not look at him while he, shamefaced but undeterred, went on opening and eating the 
shellfish one by one. 
When he was done, he went back into the cave to the boat, which lay prow forward, kept from the 
sand by several long driftwood logs. Tenar had looked at the boat the night before, mistrustfully and 
without comprehension. It was much larger than she had thought boats were, three times her own length. 
It was full of objects she did not know the use of, and it looked dangerous. On either side of its nose 
(which is what she called the prow) an eye was painted; and in her halfsleep she had constantly felt the 
boat staring at her. 
Ged rummaged about inside it a moment and came back with something: a packet of hard bread, 
well wrapped to keep dry. He offered her a large piece. 
"I'm not hungry." 
He looked into her sullen face. 
He put the bread away, wrapping it as before, and then sat down in the mouth of the cave. "About 
two hours till the tide's back in," he said. "Then we can go. You had a restless night, why don't you sleep 
now." 
"I'm not sleepy." 
He made no answer. He sat there, in profile to her, cross-legged in the dark arch of rocks; the 
shining heave and movement of the sea was beyond him as she watched him from deeper in the cave. He 
did not move. He was still as the rocks themselves. Stillness spread out from him, like rings from a stone 
dropped in water. His silence became not absence of speech, but a thing in itself, like the silence of the 
desert, 

 After a long time Tenar got up and came to the mouth of the cave. He did not move. She looked 
down at his face. It was as if cast in copper-rigid, the dark eyes not shut, but looking down, the mouth 
serene. 
He was as far beyond her as the sea. 
Where was he now, on what way of the spirit did he walk? She could never follow him. 
He had made her follow him. He had called her by her name, and she had come crouching to his 
hand, as the little wild desert rabbit had come to him out of the dark. And now that he had the ring, now 
that the Tombs were in ruin and their priestess forsworn forever, now he didn't need her, and went away 
where she could not follow. He would not stay with her. He had fooled her, and would leave her 
desolate. 
She reached down and with one swift gesture plucked from his belt the little steel dagger she had 
given him. He moved no more than a robbed statue. 
The dagger blade was only four inches long, sharp on one side; it was the miniature of a sacrificial 
knife. It was part of the garments of the Priestess of the Tombs, who must wear it along with the ring of 
keys, and a belt of horsehair, and other items some of which had no known purpose. She had never used 
the dagger for anything, except that in one of the dances performed at dark of the moon she would throw 
and catch it before the Throne. She had liked that dance; it was a wild one, with no music but the 
drumming of her own feet. She had used to cut her fingers, practicing it, till she got the trick of catching 
the knife handle every time. The little blade was sharp enough to cut a finger to the bone, or to cut the 
arteries of a throat. She would serve her Masters still, though they had betrayed her and forsaken her. 
They would guide and drive her hand in the last act of darkness. They would accept the sacrifice. 
She turned upon the man, the knife held back in her right hand behind her hip. As she did so he 
raised his face slowly and looked at her. He had the look of one come from a long way off, one who has 
seen terrible things. His face was calm but full of pain. As he gazed up at her and seemed to see her 
more and more clearly, his expression cleared. At last he said, "Tenar," as if in greeting, and reached up 
his hand to touch the band of pierced and carven silver on her wrist. He did this as if reassuring himself, 
trustingly. He did not pay attention to the dagger in her hand. He looked away, at the waves, which 
heaved deep over the rocks below, and said with effort, "It's time... Time we were going." 
At the sound of his voice the fury left her. She was afraid. 
"You'll leave them behind, Tenar. You're going free now," he said, getting up with sudden vigor. 
He stretched, and belted his cloak tight again. "Give me a hand with the boat. She's up on logs, for 
rollers. That's it, push... again. There, there, enough. Now be ready to hop in when I say `hop.' This is a 
tricky place to launch from- once more. There! In you go!"-and leaping in after her, he caught her as she 
overbalanced, sat her down in the bottom of the boat, braced his legs wide, and standing to the oars sent 
the boat shooting out on an ebb wave over the rocks, out past the roaring foam-drenched head of the 
cape, and so to sea. 
He shipped the oars when they were well away from shoal water, and stepped the mast. The boat 
looked very small, now that she was inside it and the sea was outside it. 
He put up the sail. All the gear had a look of long, hard use, though the dull red sail was patched 
with great care and the boat was as clean and trim as could be. They were like their master: they had 
gone far, and had not been treated gently. 
"Now," he said, "now we're away, now we're clear, we're clean gone, Tenar. Do you feel it?" 
She did feel it. A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as 

she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and 
wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was 
free. 
What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange 
burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice 
may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the 
end of it. 
Ged let her cry, and said no word of comfort; nor when she was done with tears and sat looking 
back towards the low blue land of Atuan, did he speak. His face was stern and alert, as if he were alone; 
he saw to the sail and the steering, quick and silent, looking always ahead. 
In the afternoon he pointed rightward of the sun, towards which they now sailed. "That is Karego- 
At," he said, and Tenar following his gesture saw the distant loom of hills like clouds, the great island of 
the Godking. Atuan was out of sight behind them. Her heart was very heavy. The sun beat in her eyes 
like a hammer of gold. 
Supper was dry bread, and dried smoked fish, which tasted vile to Tenar, and water from the boat's 
cask, which Ged had filled at a stream on Cloud Cape beach the evening before. The winter night came 
down soon and cold upon the sea. Far off to northward they saw for a while the tiny glitter of lights, 
yellow firelight in distant villages on the shore of Karego-At. These vanished in a haze that rose up from 
the ocean, and they were alone in the starless night over deep water. 
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 halfring, 
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, grayed 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 gray 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 Great 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. 
--end-- 

THE FARTHEST SHORE 

URSULA K. LEGUIN 

1972 

 

 

 

 

------ 

The Rowan Tree 

------ 

 

 In the Court of the Fountain the sun of March shone through young leaves of 
ash and elm, and water leapt and fell through shadow and clear light. About that 
roofless court stood four high walls of stone. Behind those were rooms and courts, 
passages, corridors, towers, and at last the heavy outmost walls of the Great House 
of Roke, which would stand any assault of war or earthquake or the sea itself, being 
built not only of stone, but of incontestable magic. For Roke is the Isle of the 
Wise, where the art magic is taught; and the Great House is the school and central 
place of wizardry; and the central place of the House is that small court far within 
the walls, where the fountain plays and the trees stand in rain or sun or starlight. 

 The tree nearest the fountain, a well-grown rowan, had humped and cracked 
the marble pavement with its roots. Veins of bright green moss filled the cracks, 
spreading up from the grassy plot around the basin. A boy sat there on the low hump 
of marble and moss, his gaze following the fall of the fountain's central jet. He 
was nearly a man, but still a boy; slender, dressed richly. His face might have 
been cast in golden bronze, it was so finely molded and so still. 

 Behind him, fifteen feet away perhaps, under the trees at the other end of 
the small central lawn, a man stood, or seemed to stand. It was hard to be certain 
in that flickering shift of shadow and warm light. Surely he was there, a man in 
white, standing motionless. As the boy watched the fountain, the man watched the 
boy. There was no sound or movement but the play of leaves and the play of the water 
and its continual song. 

 The man walked forward. A wind stirred the rowan tree and moved its newly 
opened leaves. The boy leapt to his feet, lithe and startled. He faced the man and 
bowed to him. "My Lord Archmage," he said. 

 The man stopped before him, a short, straight, vigorous figure in a hooded 
cloak of white wool. Above the folds of the laid-down hood his face was reddish-dark, 
hawk-nosed, seamed on one cheek with old scars. The eyes were bright and fierce. 
Yet he spoke gently. "It's a pleasant pace to sit, the Court of the Fountain," he 
said, and, forestalling the boy's apology, "You have traveled far and have not 
rested. Sit down again." 

 He knelt on the white rim of the basin and held out his hand to the ring of 
glittering drops that fell from the higher bowl of the fountain, letting the water 
run through his fingers. The boy sat down again on the humped tiles, and for a minute 
neither spoke. 

 "You are the son of the Prince of Enlad and the Enlades," the Archmage said, 
"heir of the Principality of Morred. There is no older heritage in all Earthsea, 
and none fairer. I have seen the orchards of Enlad in the spring, and the golden 
roofs of Berila... How are you called?" 

 "I am called Arren." 

 "That would be a word in the dialect of your land. What is it in our common 
speech?" 

 The boy said, "Sword." 

 The Archmage nodded. There was silence again, and then the boy said, not 
boldly, but without timidity, "I had thought the Archmage knew all languages" 

 The man shook his head, watching the fountain. 

 "And all names..." 


 "All names? Only Segoy who spoke the First Word, raising up the isles from 
the deep sea, knew all names. To be sure," and the bright, fierce gaze was on Arren's 
face, "if I needed to know your true name, I would know it. But there's no need. 
Arren I will call you; and I am Sparrowhawk. Tell me, how was your voyage here?" 

 "Too long." 

 "The winds blew ill?" 

 "The winds blew fair, but the news I bear is ill, Lord Sparrowhawk." 

 "Tell it, then," the Archmage said gravely, but like one yielding to a child's 
impatience; and while Arren spoke, he looked again at the crystal curtain of water 
drops falling from the upper basin into the lower, not as if he did not listen, 
but as if he listened to more than the boy's words. 

 "You know, my lord, that the prince my father is a wizardly man, being of 
the lineage of Morred, and having spent a year here on Roke in his youth. Some power 
he has and knowledge, though he seldom uses his arts, being concerned with the ruling 
and ordering of his realm, the governance of cities and matters of trade. The fleets 
of our island go out westward, even into the West Reach, trading for sapphires and 
Ox hides and tin, and early this winter a sea captain returned to our city Berila 
with a tale that came to my father's ears, so that he had the man sent for and heard 
him tell it" The boy spoke quickly, with assurance. He had been trained by civil, 
courtly people, and did not have the self-consciousness of the young. 

 "The sea captain said that on the isle of Narveduen, which is some five hundred 
miles west of us by the ship lanes, there was no more magic. Spells had no power 
there, he said, and the words of wizardry were forgotten. My father asked him if 
it was that all the sorcerers and witches had left that isle, and he answered, No: 
there were some there who had been sorcerers, but they cast no more spells, not 
even so much as a charm for kettle-mending or the finding of a lost needle. And 
my father asked, Were not the folk of Narveduen dismayed? And the sea captain said 
again, No, they seemed uncaring. And indeed, he said, there was sickness among them, 
and their autumn harvest had been poor, and still they seemed careless. He said 
-I was there, when he spoke to the prince- he said, `They were like sick men, like 
a man who has been told he must die within the year, and tells himself it is not 
true, and he will live forever. They go about,' he said, `without looking at the 
world.' When other traders returned, they repeated the tale that Narveduen had 
become a poor land and had lost the arts of wizardry. But all this was mere tales 
of the Reach, which are always strange, and only my father gave it much thought. 

 "Then in the New Year, in the Festival of the Lambs that we hold in Enlad, 
when the shepherds' wives come into the city bringing the firstlings of the flocks, 
my father named the wizard Root to say the spells of increase over the lambs. But 
Root came back to our hall distressed and laid his staff down and said, `My lord, 
I cannot say the spells.' My father questioned him, but he could say only, `I have 
forgotten the words and the patterning.' So my father went to the marketplace and 
said the spells himself, and the festival was completed. But I saw him come home 
to the palace that evening, and he looked grim and weary, and he said to me, `I 
said the words, but I do not know if they had meaning.' And indeed there's trouble 
among the flocks this spring, the ewes dying in birth, and many lambs born dead, 
and some are... deformed." The boy's easy, eager voice dropped; he winced as he 
said the word and swallowed. "I saw some of them," he said. There was a pause. 

 "My father believes that this matter, and the tale of Narveduen, show some 
evil at work in our part of the world. He desires the counsel of the Wise." 

 "That he sent you proves that his desire is urgent," said the Archmage. "You 
are his only son, and the voyage from Enlad to Roke is not short. Is there more 
to tell?" 

 "Only some old wives' tales from the hills." 

 "What do the old wives say?" 

 "That all the fortunes witches read in smoke and water pools tell of ill, 
and that their love-potions go amiss. But these are people without true wizardry." 

 "Fortune-telling and love-potions are not of much account, but old women are 


worth listening to. Well, your message will indeed be discussed by the Masters of 
Roke. But I do not know, Arren, what counsel they may give your father. For Enlad 
is not the first land from which such tidings have come." 

 Arren's trip from the north, down past the great isle Havnor and through the 
Inmost Sea to Roke, was his first voyage. Only in these last few weeks had he seen 
lands that were not his own homeland, become aware of distance and diversity, and 
recognized that there was a great world beyond the pleasant hills of Enlad, and 
many people in it. He was not yet used to thinking widely, and so it was a while 
before he understood. "Where else?" he asked then, a little dismayed. For he had 
hoped to bring a prompt cure home to Enlad. 

 "In the South Reach, first. Latterly even in the south of the Archipelago, 
in Wathort. There is no more magic done in Wathort, men say. It is hard to be sure. 
That land has long been rebellious and piratical, and to hear a Southern trader 
is to hear a liar, as they say. Yet the story is always the same: The springs of 
wizardry have run dry." 

 "But here on Roke-" 

 "Here on Roke we have felt nothing of this. We are defended here from storm 
and change and all ill chance. Too well defended, perhaps. Prince, what will you 
do now?" 

 "I shall go back to Enlad when I can bring my father some clear word of the 
nature of this evil and of its remedy." 

 Once more the Archmage looked at him, and this time, for all his training, 
Arren looked away. He did not know why, for there was nothing unkind in the gaze 
of those dark eyes. They were impartial, calm, compassionate. 

 All in Enlad looked up to his father, and he was his father's son. No man 
had ever looked at him thus, not as Arren, Prince of Enlad, son of the Ruling Prince, 
but as Arren alone. He did not like to think that he feared the Archmage's gaze, 
but he could not meet it. It seemed to enlarge the world yet again around him, and 
now not only Enlad sank to insignificance, but he himself, so that in the eyes of 
the Archmage he was only a small figure, very small, in a vast scene of sea-girt 
lands over which hung darkness. 

 He sat picking at the vivid moss that grew in the cracks of the marble 
flagstones, and presently he said, hearing his voice, which had deepened only in 
the last couple of years, sound thin and husky: "And I shall do as you bid me." 

 "Your duty is to your father, not to me," the Archmage said. 

 His eyes were still on Arren, and now the boy looked up. As he had made his 
act of submission he had forgotten himself, and now he saw the Archmage: the greatest 
wizard of all Earthsea, the man who had capped the Black Well of Fundaur and won 
the Ring of Erreth-Akbe from the Tombs of Atuan and built the deep-founded sea wall 
of Nepp; the sailor who knew the seas from Astowell to Selidor; the only living 
Dragonlord. There he knelt beside a fountain, a short man and not young, a 
quiet-voiced man, with eyes as deep as evening. 

 Arren scrambled up from sitting and knelt down formally on both knees, all 
in haste. "My lord," he said stammering, "let me serve you!" 

 His self-assurance was gone, his face was flushed, his voice shook. 

 At his hip he wore a sword in a sheath of new leather figured with inlay of 
red and gold; but the sword itself was plain, with a worn cross-hilt of silvered 
bronze. This he drew forth, all in haste, and offered the hilt to the Archmage, 
as a liegeman to his prince. 

 The Archmage did not put out his hand to touch the sword hilt. He looked at 
it and at Arren. "That is yours, not mine," he said. "And you are no man's servant." 

 "But my father said that I might stay on Roke until I learned what this evil 
is and maybe some mastery -I have no skill, I don't think I have any power, but 
there were mages among my forefathers- if I might in some way learn to be of use 
to you-" 

 "Before your ancestors were mages," the Archmage said, "they were kings." 

 He stood up and came with silent, vigorous step to Arren, and taking the boy's 


hand made him rise. "I thank you for your offer of service, and though I do not 
accept it now, yet I may, when we have taken counsel on these matters. The offer 
of a generous spirit is not one to refuse lightly. Nor is the sword of the son of 
Morred to be lightly turned aside!... Now go. The lad who brought you here will 
see that you eat and bathe and rest. Go on," and he pushed Arren lightly between 
the shoulder blades, a familiarity no one had ever taken before, and which the young 
prince would have resented from anyone else; but he felt the Archmage's touch as 
a thrill of glory. For Arren had fallen in love. 

 He had been an active boy, delighting in games, taking pride and pleasure 
in the skills of body and mind, apt at his duties of ceremony and governing, which 
were neither light nor simple. Yet he had never given himself entirely to anything. 
All had come easily to him, and he had done all easily; it had all been a game, 
and he had played at loving. But now the depths of him were wakened, not by a game 
or dream, but by honor, danger, wisdom, by a scarred face and a quiet voice and 
a dark hand holding, careless of its power, the staff of yew that bore near the 
grip, in silver set in the black wood, the Lost Rune of the Kings. 

 So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before 
or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve. 

 Forgetting courtly farewells he hurried to the doorway, awkward, radiant, 
obedient. And Ged the Archmage watched him go. 

 

 Ged stood a while by the fountain under the ash tree, then raised his face 
to the sunwashed sky. "A gentle messenger for bad news," he said half aloud, as 
if talking to the fountain. It did not listen, but went on talking in its own silver 
tongue, and he listened to it a while. Then, going to another doorway, which Arren 
had not seen, and which indeed very few eyes would have seen no matter how close 
they looked, he said, "Master Doorkeeper." 

 A little man of no age appeared. Young he was not, so that one had to call 
him old, but the word did not suit him. His face was dry and colored like ivory, 
and he had a pleasant smile that made long curves in his cheeks. "What's the matter, 
Ged?" said he. 

 For they were alone, and he was one of the seven persons in the world who 
knew the Archmage's name. The others were the Master Namer of Roke; and Ogion the 
Silent, the wizard of Re Albi, who long ago on the mountain of Gont had given Ged 
that name; and the White Lady of Gont, Tenar of the Ring; and a village wizard in 
Iffish called Vetch; and in Iffish again, a house-carpenter's wife, mother of three 
girls, ignorant of all sorcery but wise in other things, who was called Yarrow; 
and finally, on the other side of Earthsea, in the farthest west, two dragons: Orm 
Embar and Kalessin. 

 "We should meet tonight," the Archmage said. "I'll go to the Patterner. And 
I'll send to Kurremkarmerruk, so that he'll put his lists away and let his students 
rest one evening and come to us, if not in flesh. Will you see to the others?" 

 "Aye," said the Doorkeeper, smiling, and was gone; and the Archmage also was 
gone; and the fountain talked to itself all serene and never ceasing in the sunlight 
of early spring. 

 

 Somewhere to the west of the Great House of Roke, and often somewhat south 
of it, the Immanent Grove is usually to be seen. There is no place for it on maps, 
and there is no way to it except for those who know the way to it. But even novices 
and townsfolk and farmers can see it, always at a certain distance, a wood of high 
trees whose leaves have a hint of gold in their greenness even in the spring. And 
they consider -the novices, the townsfolk, the farmers- that the Grove moves about 
in a mystifying manner. But in this they are mistaken, for the Grove does not move. 
Its roots are the roots of being. It is all the rest that moves. 

 Ged walked over the fields from the Great House. He took off his white cloak, 
for the sun was at noon. A farmer ploughing a brown hillside raised his hand in 
salute, and Ged replied the same way. Small birds went up into the air and sang. 


The sparkweed was just coming into flower in the fallows and beside the roads. Far 
up, a hawk cut a wide arc on the sky. Ged glanced up, and raised his hand again. 
Down shot the bird in a rush of windy feathers, and stooped straight to the offered 
wrist, gripping with yellow claws. It was no sparrowhawk but a big Ender-falcon 
of Roke, a white-and-brown-barred fishing hawk. It looked sidelong at the Archmage 
with one round, bright-gold eye, then clashed its hooked beak and stared at him 
straight on with both round, bright gold eyes. "Fearless," the Archmage said to 
it in the tongue of the Making. 

 The big hawk beat its wings and gripped with its talons, gazing at him. 

 "Go then, brother, fearless one." 

 The farmer, away off on the hillside under the bright sky, had stopped to 
watch. Once last autumn he had watched the Archmage take a wild bird on his wrist, 
and then in the next moment had seen no man, but two hawks mounting on the wind. 

 This time they parted as the farmer watched: the bird to the high air, the 
man walking on across the muddy fields. 

 He came to the path that led to the Immanent Grove, a path that led always 
straight and direct no matter how time and the world bent awry about it, and 
following it came soon into the shadow of the trees. 

 The trunks of some of these were vast. Seeing them one could believe at last 
that the Grove never moved: they were like immemorial towers grey with years; their 
roots were like the roots of mountains. Yet these, the most ancient, were some of 
them thin of leaf, with branches that had died. They were not immortal. Among the 
giants grew sapling trees, tall and vigorous with bright crowns of foliage, and 
seedlings, slight leafy wands no taller than a girl. 

 The ground beneath the trees was soft, rich with the rotten leaves of all 
the years. Ferns and small woodland plants grew in it, but there was no kind of 
tree but the one, which had no name in the Hardic tongue of Earthsea. Under the 
branches the air smelled earthy and fresh, and had a taste in the mouth like live 
spring-water. 

 In a glade which had been made years before by the falling of an enormous 
tree, Ged met the Master Patterner, who lived within the Grove and seldom or never 
came forth from it. His hair was butter-yellow; he was no Archipelagan. Since the 
restoral of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, the barbarians of Kargad had ceased their 
forays and had struck some bargains of trade and peace with the Inner Lands. They 
were not friendly folk, and held aloof. But now and then a young warrior or 
merchant's son came westward by himself, drawn by love of adventure or craving to 
learn wizardry. Such had been the Master Patterner ten years ago, a sword-begirt, 
red-plumed young savage from Karego-At, arriving at Gont on a rainy morning and 
telling the Doorkeeper in imperious and scanty Hardic, "I come to learn!" And now 
he stood in the greengold light under the trees, a tall man and fair, with long 
fair hair and strange green eyes, the Master Patterner of Earthsea. 

 It may be that he too knew Ged's name, but if so he never spoke it. They greeted 
each other in silence. 

 "What are you watching there?" the Archmage asked, and the other answered, 
"A spider." 

 Between two tall grass blades in the clearing a spider had spun a web, a circle 
delicately suspended. The silver threads caught the sunlight. In the center the 
spinner waited, a grey-black thing no larger than the pupil of an eye. 

 "She too is a patterner," Ged said, studying the artful web. 

 "What is evil?" asked the younger man. 

 The round web, with its black center, seemed to watch them both. 

 "A web we men weave," Ged answered. 

 In this wood no birds sang. It was silent in the noon light and hot. About 
them stood the trees and shadows. 

 "There is word from Narveduen and Enlad: the same." 

 "South and southwest. North and northwest," said the Patterner, never looking 
from the round web. 


 "We shall come here this evening. This is the best place for counsel." 

 "I have no counsel." The Patterner looked now at Ged, and his greenish eyes 
were cold. "I am afraid," he said. "There is fear. There is fear at the roots." 

 "Aye," said Ged. "We must look to the deep springs, I think. We have enjoyed 
the sunlight too long, basking in that peace which the healing of the Ring brought, 
accomplishing small things, fishing the shallows. Tonight we must question the 
depths: And so he left the Patterner alone, gazing still at the spider in the sunny 
grass. 

 At the edge of the Grove, where the leaves of the great trees reached out 
over ordinary ground, he sat with his back against a mighty root, his staff across 
his knees. He shut his eyes as if resting, and sent a sending of his spirit over 
the hills and fields of Roke, northward, to the sea-assaulted cape where the Isolate 
Tower stands. 

 "Kurremkarmerruk," he said in spirit, and the Master Namer looked up from 
the thick book of names of roots and herbs and leaves and seeds and petals that 
he was reading to his pupils and said, "I am here, my lord." 

 Then he listened, a big, thin old man, white-haired under his dark hood; and 
the students at their writing-tables in the tower room looked up at him and glanced 
at one another. 

 "I will come," Kurremkarmerruk said, and bent his head to his book again, 
saying, "Now the petal of the flower of moly hath a name, which is iebera, and so 
also the sepal, which is partonath; and stem and leaf and root hath each his name..." 

 But under his tree the Archmage Ged, who knew all the names of moly, withdrew 
his sending and, stretching out his legs more comfortably and keeping his eyes shut, 
presently fell asleep in the leafspotted sunlight. 

 

 

 

------ 

The Masters of Roke 

------ 

 

 The School on Roke is where boys who show promise in sorcery are sent from 
all the Inner Lands of Earthsea to learn the highest arts of magic. There they become 
proficient in the various kinds of sorcery, learning names, and runes, and skills, 
and spells, and what should and what should not be done, and why. And there, after 
long practice, and if hand and mind and spirit all keep pace together, they may 
be named wizard, and receive the staff of power. True wizards are made only on Roke. 

 Since there are sorcerers and witches on all the isles, and the uses of magic 
are as needful to their people as bread and as delightful as music, so the School 
of Wizardry is a place held in reverence. The nine mages who are the Masters of 
the School are considered the equals of the great princes of the Archipelago. Their 
master, the warden of Roke, the Archmage, is held to be accountable to no man at 
all, except the King of All the Isles; and that only by an act of fealty, by heart's 
gift, for not even a king could constrain so great a mage to serve the common law, 
if his will were otherwise. Yet even in the kingless centuries, the Archmages of 
Roke kept fealty and served that common law. All was done on Roke as it had been 
done for many hundreds of years; a place safe from all trouble it seemed, and the 
laughter of boys rang in the echoing courts and down the broad, cold corridors of 
the Great House. 

 Arren's guide about the School was a stocky lad whose cloak was clasped at 
the neck with silver, a token that he had passed his novicehood and was a proven 
sorcerer, studying to gain his staff. He was called Gamble, "because," said he, 
"my parents had six girls, and the seventh child, my father said, was a gamble 
against Fate." He was an agreeable companion, quick of mind and tongue. At another 
time Arren would have enjoyed his humor, but today his mind was too full. He did 
not pay him very much attention, in fact. And Gamble, with a natural wish to be 


given credit for existence, began to take advantage of the guest's absentmindedness. 
He told him strange facts about the School, and then told him strange lies about 
the School, and to all of them Arren said, "Oh, yes" or "I see," until Gamble thought 
him a royal idiot. 

 "Of course they don't cook in here," he said, showing Arren past the huge 
stone kitchens all alive with the glitter of copper cauldrons and the clatter of 
chopping-knives and the eye-prickling smell of onions. "It's just for show. We come 
to the refectory, and everybody charms up whatever he wants to eat. Saves 
dishwashing too." 

 "Yes, I see," said Arren politely. 

 "Of course novices who haven't learnt the spells yet often lose a good deal 
of weight, their first months here; but they learn. There's one boy from Havnor 
who always tries for roast chicken, but all he ever gets is millet mush. He can't 
seem to get his spells past millet mush. He did get a dried haddock along with it, 
yesterday." Gamble was getting hoarse with the effort to push his guest into 
incredulity. He gave up and stopped talking. 

 "Where... what land does the Archmage come from?" said that guest, not even 
looking at the mighty gallery through which they were walking, all carven on wall 
and arched ceiling with the Thousand-Leaved Tree. 

 "Gont," said Gamble. "He was a village goatherd there." , 

 Now, at this plain and well-known fact, the boy from Enlad turned and looked 
with disapproving unbelief at Gamble. "A goatherd?" 

 "That's what most Gontishmen are, unless they're pirates or sorcerers. I 
didn't say he was a goatherd now, you know!" 

 "But how would a goatherd become Archmage?" 

 "The same way a prince would! By coming to Roke and outdoing all the Masters, 
by stealing the Ring in Atuan, by sailing the Dragons' Run, by being the greatest 
wizard since Erreth-Akbe - how else?" 

 They came out of the gallery by the north door. Late afternoon lay warm and 
bright on the furrowed hills and the roofs of Thwil Town and the bay beyond. There 
they stood to talk. Gamble said, "Of course that's all long ago, now. He hasn't 
done much since he was named Archmage. They never do. They just sit on Roke and 
watch the Equilibrium, I suppose. And he's quite old now." 

 "Old? How old?" 

 "Oh, forty or fifty." 

 "Have you seen him?" 

 "Of course I've seen him," Gamble said sharply. The royal idiot seemed also 
to be a royal snob. 

 "Often?" 

 "No. He keeps to himself. But when I first came to Roke I saw him, in the 
Fountain Court." 

 "I spoke with him there today," Arren said. 

 His tone made Gamble look at him and then answer him fully: "It was three 
years ago. And I was so frightened I never really looked at him. I was pretty young, 
of course. But its hard to see things clearly in there. I remember his voice, mostly, 
and the fountain running." After a moment he added, "He does have a Gontish accent." 

 "If I could speak to dragons in their own language," Arren said, "I wouldn't 
care about my accent." 

 At that Gamble looked at him with a degree of approval, and asked, "Did you 
come here to join the school, prince?" 

 "No. I carried a message from my father to the Archmage." 

 "Enlad is one of the Principalities of the Kingship, isn't it?" 

 "Enlad, Ilien, and Way. Havnor and Ea, once, but the line of descent from 
the kings has died out in those lands. Ilien traces the descent from Gemal Seaborn 
through Maharion, who was King of all the Isles. Way, from Akambar and the House 
of Shelieth. Enlad, the oldest, from Morred through his son Serriadh and the House 
of Enlad" 


 Arren recited these genealogies with a dreamy air, like a well-trained 
scholar whose mind is on another subject. 

 "Do you think we'll see a king in Havnor again in our lifetime?" 

 "I never thought about it much." 

 "In Ark, where I come from, people think about it. We're part of the 
Principality of Ilien now, you know, since peace was made. How long has it been, 
seventeen years or eighteen, since the Ring of the King's Rune was returned to the 
Tower of the Kings in Havnor? Things were better for a while then, but now they're 
worse than ever. It's time there was a king again on the throne of Earthsea, to 
wield the Sign of Peace. People are tired of wars and raids and merchants who 
overprice and princes who overtax and all the confusion of unruly powers. Roke 
guides, but it can't rule. The Balance lies here, but the Power should lie in the 
king's hands." 

 Gamble spoke with real interest, all foolery set aside, and Arren's attention 
was finally caught. "Enlad is a rich and peaceful land," he said slowly. "It has 
never entered into these rivalries. We hear of the troubles in other lands. But 
there's been no king on the throne in Havnor since Maharion died: eight hundred 
years. Would the lands indeed accept a king?" 

 "If he came in peace and in strength; if Roke and Havnor recognized his claim." 

 "And there is a prophecy that must be fulfilled, isn't there? Maharion said 
that the next king must be a mage." 

 "The Master Chanter's a Havnorian and interested in the matter, and he's been 
dinning the words into us for three years now. Maharion said, He shall inherit my 
throne who has crossed the dark land living and come to the far shores of the day." 

 "Therefore a mage." 

 "Yes, since only a wizard or mage can go among the dead in the dark land and 
return. Though they do not cross it. At least, they always speak of it as if it 
had only one boundary, and beyond that, no end. What are the far shores of the day, 
then? But so runs the prophecy of the Last King, and therefore someday one will 
be born to fulfill it. And Roke will recognize him, and the fleets and armies and 
nations will come together to him. Then there will be majesty again in the center 
of the world, in the Tower of the Kings in Havnor. I would come to such a one; I 
would serve a true king with all my heart and all my art," said Gamble, and then 
laughed and shrugged, lest Arren think he spoke with over-much emotion. But Arren 
looked at him with friendliness, thinking, "He would feel toward the king as I do 
toward the Archmage." Aloud he said, "A king would need such men as you about him." 

 They stood, each thinking his own thoughts, yet companionable, until a gong 
rang sonorous in the Great House behind them. 

 "There!" said Gamble. "Lentil and onion soup tonight. Come on." 

 "I thought you said they didn't cook," said Arren, still dreamy, following. 

 "Oh, sometimes -by mistake-" 

 No magic was involved in the dinner, though plenty of substance was. After 
it they walked out over the fields in the soft blue of the dusk. "This is Roke Knoll," 
Gamble said, as they began to climb a rounded hill. The dewy grass brushed their 
legs, and down by the marshy Thwilburn there was a chorus of little toads to welcome 
the first warmth and the shortening, starry nights. 

 There was a mystery in that ground. Gamble said softly, "This hill was the 
first that stood above the sea, when the First Word was spoken." 

 "And it will be the last to sink, when all things are unmade," said Arren. 

 "Therefore a safe place to stand on," Gamble said, shaking off awe; but then 
he cried, awestruck, "Look! The Grove!" 

 South of the Knoll a great light was revealed on the earth, like moonrise, 
but the thin moon was already setting westward over the hill's top; and there was 
a flickering in this radiance, like the movement of leaves in the wind. 

 "What is it?" 

 "It comes from the Grove- the Masters must be there. They say it burnt so, 
with a light like moonlight, all night, when they met to choose the Archmage five 


years ago. But why are they meeting now? Is it the news you brought?" 

 "It may be," said Arren. 

 Gamble, excited and uneasy, wanted to return to the Great House to hear any 
rumor of what the Council of the Masters portended. Arren went with him, but looked 
back often at that strange radiance till the slope hid it, and there was only the 
new moon setting and the stars of spring. 

 Alone in the dark in the stone cell that was his sleeping-room, Arren lay 
with eyes open. He had slept on a bed all his life, under soft furs; even in the 
twenty-oared galley in which he had come from Enlad they had provided their young 
prince with more comfort than this-a straw pallet on the stone floor and a ragged 
blanket of felt. But he noticed none of it. "I am at the center of the world," he 
thought. "The Masters are talking in the holy place. What will they do? Will they 
weave a great magic to save magic? Can it be true that wizardry is dying out of 
the world? Is there a danger that threatens even Roke? I will stay here. I will 
not go home. I would rather sweep his room than be a prince in Enlad. Would he let 
me stay as a novice? But perhaps there will be no more teaching of the art-magic, 
no more learning of the true names of things. My father has the gift of wizardry, 
but I do not; perhaps it is indeed dying out of the world. Yet I would stay near 
him, even if he lost his power and his art. Even if I never saw him. Even if he 
never said another word to me." But his ardent imagination swept him on past that, 
so that in a moment he saw himself face to face with the Archmage once more in the 
court beneath the rowan tree, and the sky was dark and the tree leafless and the 
fountain silent; and he said, "My lord, the storm is on us, yet I will stay by thee 
and serve thee," and the Archmage smiled at him... But there imagination failed, 
for he had not seen that dark face smile. 

 In the morning he rose, feeling that yesterday he had been a boy, today he 
was a man. He was ready for anything. But when it came, he stood gaping. "The Archmage 
wishes to speak to you, Prince Arren," said a little novice-lad at his doorway, 
who waited a moment and ran off before Arren could collect his wits to answer. 

 He made his way down the tower staircase and through stone corridors toward 
the Fountain Court, not knowing where he should go. An old man met him in the corridor, 
smiling so that deep furrows ran down his cheeks from nose to chin: the same who 
had met him yesterday at the door of the Great House when he first came up from 
the harbor, and had required him to say his true name before he entered. "Come this 
way," said the Master Doorkeeper. 

 The halls and passages in this part of the building were silent, empty of 
the rush and racket of the boys that enlivened the rest. Here one felt the great 
age of the walls. The enchantment with which the ancient stones were laid and 
protected was here palpable. Runes were graven on the walls at intervals, cut deep, 
some inlaid with silver. Arren had learned the Runes of Hardie from his father, 
but none of these did he know, though certain of them seemed to hold a meaning that 
he almost knew, or had known and could not quite remember. 

 "Here you are, lad," said the Doorkeeper, who made no account of titles such 
as Lord or Prince. Arren followed him into a long, low-beamed room, where on one 
side a fire burnt in a stone hearth, its flames reflecting in the oaken floor, and 
on the other side pointed windows let in the cold, soft light of fog. Before the 
hearth stood a group of men. All looked at him as he entered, but among them he 
saw only one, the Archmage. He stopped, and bowed, and stood dumb. 

 "These are the Masters of Roke, Arren," said the Archmage, "seven of the nine. 
The Patterner will not leave his Grove, and the Namer is in his tower, thirty miles 
to the north. All of them know your errand here. My lords, this is the son of Morred." 

 No pride roused in Arren at that phrase, but only a kind of dread. He was 
proud of his lineage, but thought of himself only as an heir of princes, one of 
the House of Enlad. Morred, from whom that house descended, had been dead two 
thousand years. His deeds were matter of legends, not of this present world. It 
was as if the Archmage had named him son of myth, inheritor of dreams. 

 He did not dare look up at the faces of the eight mages. He stared at the 


iron-shod foot of the Archmage's staff, and felt the blood ringing in his ears. 

 "Come, let us breakfast together," said the Archmage, and led them to a table 
set beneath the windows. There was milk and sour beer, bread, new butter, and cheese. 
Arren sat with them and ate. 

 He had been among noblemen, landholders, rich merchants, all his life. His 
father's hall in Berila was full of them: men who owned much, who bought and sold 
much, who were rich in the things of the world. They ate meat and drank wine and 
talked loudly; many disputed, many flattered, most sought something for themselves. 
Young as he was, Arren had learned a good deal about the manners and disguises of 
humanity. But he had never been among such men as these. They ate bread and talked 
little, and their faces were quiet. If they sought something, it was not for 
themselves. Yet they were men of great power: that, too, Arren recognized. 

 Sparrowhawk the Archmage sat at the head of the table and seemed to listen 
to what was said, and yet there was a silence about him, and no one spoke to him. 
Arren was let alone also, so that he had time to recover himself. On his left was 
the Doorkeeper, and on his right a grey-haired man with a kindly look, who said 
to him at last, "We are countrymen, Prince Arren. I was born in eastern Enlad, by 
the Forest of Aol." 

 "I have hunted in that forest," Arren replied, and they spoke together a 
little of the woods and towns of the Isle of the Myths, so that Arren was comforted 
by the memory of his home. 

 When the meal was done, they drew together once more before the hearth, some 
sitting and some standing, and there was a little silence. 

 "Last night," the Archmage said, "we met in council. Long we talked, yet 
resolved nothing. I would hear you say now, in the morning light, whether you uphold 
or gainsay your judgment of the night." 

 "That we resolved nothing," said the Master Herbal, a stocky, dark-skinned 
man with calm eyes, "is itself a judgment. In the Grove are patterns found; but 
we found nothing there but argument." 

 "Only because we could not see the pattern plain," said the grey-haired mage 
of Enlad, the Master Changer. "We do not know enough. Rumors from Wathort; news 
from Enlad. Strange news, and should be looked to. But to raise a great fear on 
so little a foundation is unneedful. Our power is not threatened only because a 
few sorcerers have forgotten their spells." 

 "So say I," said a lean, keen-eyed man, the Master Windkey. "Have we not all 
our powers? Do not the trees of the Grove grow and put forth leaves? Do not the 
storms of heaven obey our word? Who can fear for the art of wizardry, which is the 
oldest of the arts of man?" 

 "No man," said the Master Summoner, deep-voiced and tall, young, with a dark 
and noble face, "no man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the 
words of power. For they are the very words of the Making, and one who could silence 
them could unmake the world." 

 "Aye, and one who could do that would not be on Wathort or Narveduen," said 
the Changer. "He would be here at the gates of Roke, and the end of the world would 
be at hand! We've not come to that pass yet" 

 "Yet there is something wrong," said another, and they looked at him: 
deep-chested, solid as an oaken cask, he sat by the fire, and the voice came from 
him soft and true as the note of a great bell. He was the Master Chanter. "Where 
is the king that should be in Havnor? Roke is not the heart of the world. That tower 
is, on which the sword of Erreth-Akbe is set, and in which stands the throne of 
Serriadh, of Akambar, of Maharion. Eight hundred years has the heart of the world 
been empty! We have the crown, but no king to wear it. We have the Lost Rune, the 
King's Rune, the Rune of Peace, restored to us, but have we peace? Let there be 
a king upon the throne, and we will have peace, and even in the farthest Reaches 
the sorcerers will practice their arts with untroubled mind, and there will be order 
and a due season to all things." 

 "Aye," said the Master Hand, a slight, quick man, modest of bearing but with 


clear and seeing eyes. "I am with you, Chanter. What wonder that wizardry goes astray, 
when all else goes astray? If the whole flock wander, will our black sheep stay 
by the fold?" 

 At that the Doorkeeper laughed, but he said nothing. 

 "Then to you all," said the Archmage, it seems that there is nothing very 
wrong; or if, there is, it lies in this, that our lands are ungoverned or 
ill-governed, so that all the arts and high skills of men suffer from neglect. With 
that much I agree. Indeed it is because the South is all but lost to peaceful commerce 
that we must depend on rumor; and who has any safe word from the West Reach, save 
this from Narveduen? If ships went forth and came back safely as of old, if our 
lands of Earthsea were well-knit, we might know how things stand in the remote places, 
and so could act. And I think we would act! For, my lords, when the Prince of Enlad 
tells us that he spoke the words of the Making in a spell and yet did not know their 
meaning as he spoke them; when the Master Patterner says that there is fear at the 
roots and will say no more: is this so little a foundation for anxiety? When a storm 
begins, it is only a little cloud on the horizon." 

 "You have a sense for the black things, Sparrowhawk," said the Doorkeeper. 
"You ever did. Say what you think is wrong." 

 "I do not know. There is a weakening of power. There is a want of resolution. 
There is a dimming of the sun. I feel, my lords- I feel as if we who sit here talking, 
were all wounded mortally, and while we talk and talk our blood runs softly from 
our veins..." 

 "And you would be up and doing." 

 "I would," said the Archmage. 

 "Well," said the Doorkeeper, "can the owls keep the hawk from flying?" 

 "But where would you go?" the Changer asked, and the Chanter answered him: 
"To seek our king and bring him to his throne!" 

 The Archmage looked keenly at the Chanter, but answered only, "I would go 
where the trouble is." 

 "South or west," said the Master Windkey. 

 "And north and east if need be," said the Doorkeeper. 

 "But you are needed here, my lord," said the Changer. "Rather than to go 
seeking blindly among unfriendly peoples on strange seas, would it not be wiser 
to stay here, where all magic is strong, and find out by your arts what this evil 
or disorder is?" 

 "My arts do not avail me," the Archmage said. 

 There was that in his voice which made them all look at him, sober and with 
uneasy eyes. "I am the Warder of Roke. I do not leave Roke lightly. I wish that 
your counsel and my own were the same; but that is not to be hoped for now. The 
judgment must be mine: and I must go." 

 "To that judgment we yield," said the Summoner. 

 "And I go alone. You are the Council of Roke, and the Council must not be 
broken. Yet one I will take with me, if he will come." He looked at Arren. "You 
offered me your service, yesterday. Last night the Master Patterner said, `Not by 
chance does any man come to the shores of Roke. Not by chance is a son of Morred 
the bearer of this news' And no other word had he for us all the night. Therefore 
I ask you, Arren, will you come with me?" 

 "Yes, my lord," said Arren, with a dry throat. 

 "The prince, your father, surely would not let you go into this peril," said 
the Changer somewhat sharply, and to the Archmage, "The lad is young and not trained 
in wizardry." 

 "I have years and spells enough for both of us," Sparrowhawk said in a dry 
voice. "Arren, what of your father?" 

 "He would let me go." 

 "How can you know?" asked the Summoner. 

 Arren did not know where he was being required to go, nor when, nor why. He 
was bewildered and abashed by these grave, honest, terrible men. If he had had time 


to think he could not have said anything at all. But he had no time to think; and 
the Archmage had asked him, "Will you come with me?" 

 "When my father sent me here he said to me, `I fear a dark time is coming 
on the world, a time of danger. So I send you rather than any other messenger, for 
you can judge whether we should ask the help of the Isle of the Wise in this matter, 
or offer the help of Enlad to them.' So if I am needed, therefore I am here." 

 At that he saw the Archmage smile. There was great sweetness in the smile, 
though it was brief. "Do you see?" he said to the seven mages. "Could age or wizardry 
add anything to this?" 

 Arren felt that they looked on him approvingly then, but with a kind of 
pondering or wondering look, still. The Summoner spoke, his arched brows 
straightened to a frown: "I do not understand it, my lord. That you are bent on 
going, yes. You have been caged here five years. But always before you were alone; 
you have always gone alone. Why, now, companioned?" 

 "I never needed help before," said Sparrowhawk, with an edge of threat or 
irony in his voice. "And I have found a fit companion." There was a dangerousness 
about him, and the tall Summoner asked him no more questions, though he still 
frowned. 

 But the Master Herbal, calm-eyed and dark like a wise and patient ox, rose 
from his seat and stood monumental. "Go, my lord," he said, "and take the lad. And 
all our trust goes with you." 

 One by one the others gave assent quietly, and by ones and twos withdrew, 
until only the Summoner was left of the seven. "Sparrowhawk," he said, "I do not 
seek to question your judgment. Only I say: If you are right, if there is imbalance 
and the peril of great evil, then a voyage to Wathort, or into the West Reach, or 
to world's end, will not be far enough. Where you may have to go, can you take this 
companion, and is it fair to him?" 

 They stood apart from Arren, and the Summoner's voice was lowered, but the 
Archmage spoke openly: "It is fair." 

 "You are not telling me all you know," the Summoner said. 

 "If I knew, I would speak. I know nothing. I guess much." 

 "Let me come with you: 

 "One must guard the gates." 

 "The Doorkeeper does that-" 

 "Not only the gates of Roke. Stay here. Stay here, and watch the sunrise to 
see if it be bright, and watch at the wall of stones to see who crosses it and where 
their faces are turned. There is a breach, Thorion, there is a break, a wound, and 
it is this I go to seek. If I am lost, then maybe you will find it. But wait. I 
bid you wait for me." He was speaking now in the Old Speech, the language of the 
Making, in which all true spells are cast and on which all the great acts of magic 
depend; but very seldom is it spoken in conversation, except among the dragons. 
The Summoner made no further argument or protest, but bowed his tall head quietly 
both to the Archmage and to Arren and departed. 

 The fire crackled in the hearth. There was no other sound. Outside the windows 
the fog pressed formless and dim. 

 The Archmage stared into the flames, seeming to have forgotten Arren's 
presence. The boy stood at some distance from the hearth, not knowing if he should 
take his leave or wait to be dismissed, irresolute and somewhat desolate, feeling 
again like a small figure in a dark, illimitable, confusing space. 

 "We'll go first to Hort Town," said Sparrowhawk, turning his back to the fire. 
"News gathers there from all the South Reach, and we may find a lead. Your ship 
still waits in the bay. Speak to the master; let him carry word to your father. 
I think we should leave as soon as may be. At daybreak tomorrow. Come to the steps 
by the boathouse." 

 "My lord, what-" His voice stuck a moment. "What is it you seek?" 

 "I don't know, Arren." 

 "Then-" 


 "Then how shall I seek it? Neither do I know that. Maybe it will seek me." 
He grinned a little at Arren, but his face was like iron in the grey light of the 
windows. 

 "My lord," Arren said, and his voice was steady now, "it is true I come of 
the lineage of Morred, if any tracing of lineage so old be true. And if I can serve 
you I will account it the greatest chance and honor of my life, and there is nothing 
I would rather do. But I fear that you mistake me for something more than I am. 
" 

 "Maybe," said the Archmage. 

 "I have no great gifts or skills. I can fence with the short sword and the 
noble sword. I can sail a boat. I know the court dances and the country dances. 
I can mend a quarrel between courtiers. I can wrestle. I am a poor archer, and I 
am skillful at the game of net-ball. I can sing, and play the harp and lute. And 
that is all. There is no more. What use will I be to you? The Master Summoner is 
right-" 

 "Ah, you saw that, did you? He's jealous. He claims the privilege of older 
loyalty." 

 "And greater skill, my lord." 

 "Then you'd rather he went with me, and you stayed behind?" 

 "No! But I fear-" 

 "Fear what?" 

 Tears sprang to the boy's eyes. "To fail you," he said. 

 The Archmage turned around again to the fire. "Sit down, Arren," he said, 
and the boy came to the stone corner-seat of the hearth. "I did not mistake you 
for a wizard or a warrior or any finished thing. What you are I do not know, though 
I'm glad to know that you can sail a boat... What you will be, no one knows. But 
this much I do know: you are the son of Morred and of Serriadh." 

 Arren was silent. "That is true, my lord," he said at last. "But..." The 
Archmage said nothing, and he had to finish his sentence: "But I am not Morred. 
I am only myself." 

 "You take no pride in your lineage?" 

 "Yes, I take pride in it -because it makes me a prince; it is a responsibility, 
a thing that must be lived up to-" 

 The Archmage nodded once, sharply. "That is what I meant. To deny the past 
is to deny the future. A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies 
it. If the rowan's roots are shallow, it bears no crown." At this Arren looked up 
startled, for his true name, Lebannen, meant the rowan tree. But the Archmage had 
not said his name. "Your roots are deep," he went on. "You have strength and you 
must have room, room to grow. Thus I offer you, instead of a safe trip home to Enlad, 
an unsafe voyage to an unknown end. You need not come. The choice is yours. But 
I offer you the choice. For I am tired of safe places, and roofs, and walls around 
me." He ended abruptly, looking about him with piercing, unseeing eyes. Arren saw 
the deep restlessness of the man, and it frightened him. Yet fear sharpens 
exhilaration, and it was with a leap of the heart that he answered, "My lord, I 
choose to go with you." 

 Arren left the Great House with his heart and mind full of wonder. He told 
himself that he was happy, but the word did not seem to suit. He told himself that 
the Archmage had called him strong, a man of destiny, and that he was proud of such 
praise; but he was not proud. Why not? The most powerful wizard in the world told 
him, "Tomorrow we sail to the edge of doom," and he nodded his head and came: should 
he not feel pride? But he did not. He felt only wonder. 

 He went down through the steep, wandering streets of Thwil Town, found his 
ship's master on the Quays, and said to him, "I sail tomorrow with the Archmage, 
to Wathort and the South Reach. Tell the Prince my father that when I am released 
from this service I will come home to Berila." 

 The ship's captain looked dour. He knew how the bringer of such news might 
be received by the Prince of Enlad. "I must have writing about it from your hand, 


prince," he said. Seeing the justice in that, Arren hurried off -he felt that all 
must be done instantly- and found a strange little shop where he purchased inkstone 
and brush and a piece of soft paper, thick as felt; then he hurried back to the 
quays and sat down on the wharfside to write his parents. When he thought of his 
mother holding this piece of paper, reading the letter, a distress came into him. 
She was a blithe, patient woman, but Arren knew that he was the foundation of her 
contentment, that she longed for his quick return. There was no way to comfort her 
for his long absence. His letter was dry and brief. He signed with the sword-rune, 
sealed the letter with a bit of pitch from a caulking-pot nearby, and gave it to 
the ship's master. Then, "Wait!" he said, as if the ship were ready to set sail 
that instant, and ran back up the cobbled streets to the strange little shop. He 
had trouble finding it, for there was something shifty about the streets of Thwil; 
it almost seemed that the turnings were different every time. He came on the right 
street at last and darted into the shop under the strings of red clay beads that 
ornamented its doorway. When he was buying ink and paper he had noticed, on a tray 
of clasps and brooches, a silver brooch in the shape of a wild rose; and his mother 
was called Rose. "I'll buy that," he said, in his hasty, princely way. 

 "Ancient silverwork of the Isle of O. I can see you are a judge of the old 
crafts," said the shopkeeper, looking at the hilt -not the handsome sheath- of 
Arren's sword. "That will be four in ivory." 

 Arren paid the rather high price unquestioning; he had in his purse plenty 
of the ivory counters that serve as money in the Inner Lands. The idea of a gift 
for his mother pleased him; the act of buying pleased him; as he left the shop he 
set his hand on the pommel of his sword, with a touch of swagger. 

 His father had given him that sword on the eve of his departure from Enlad. 
He had received it solemnly and had worn it, as if it were a duty to wear it, even 
aboard ship. He was proud of the weight of it at his hip, the weight of its great 
age on his spirit. For it was the sword of Serriadh who was the son of Morred and 
Elfarran; there was none older in the world except the sword of Erreth-Akbe, which 
was set atop the Tower of the Kings in Havnor. The sword of Serriadh had never been 
laid away or hoarded up, but worn; yet was unworn by the centuries, unweakened, 
because it had been forged with a great power of enchantment. Its history said that 
it never had been drawn, nor ever could be drawn, except in the service of life. 
For no purpose of bloodlust or revenge or greed, in no war for gain, would it let 
itself be wielded. From it, the great treasure of his family, Arren had received 
his use-name: Arrendek he had been called as a child, 'the little Sword.' 

 He had not used the sword, nor had his father, nor his grandfather. There 
had been peace in Enlad for a long time. 

 And now, in the street of the strange town of the Wizards' Isle, the sword's 
handle felt strange to him when he touched it. It was awkward to his hand and cold. 
Heavy, the sword hindered his walk, dragged at him. And the wonder he had felt was 
still in him, but had gone cold. He went back down to the quay, and gave the brooch 
to the ship's master for his mother, and bade him farewell and a safe voyage home. 
Turning away he pulled his cloak over the sheath that held the old, unyielding weapon, 
the deadly thing he had inherited. He did not feel like swaggering any more. "What 
am I doing?" he said to himself as he climbed the narrow ways, not hurrying now, 
to the fortress-bulk of the Great House above the town. "How is it that I'm not 
going home? Why am I seeking something I don't understand, with a man I don't know?" 

 And he had no answer to his questions. 

 

 

------ 

Hort Town 

------ 

 

 In the darkness before dawn Arren dressed in clothing that had been given 
him, seaman's garb, wellworn but clean, and hurried down through the silent halls 


of the Great House to the eastern door, carven of horn and dragon's tooth. There 
the Doorkeeper let him out and pointed the way that he should take, smiling a little. 
He followed the topmost street of the town and then a path that led down to the 
boathouses of the School, south along the bay shore from the docks of Thwil. He 
could just make out his way. Trees, roofs, hills bulked as dim masses within dimness; 
the dark air was utterly still and very cold; everything held still, held itself 
withdrawn and obscure. Only over the dark sea eastward was there one faint, clear 
line: the horizon, tipping momently toward the unseen sun. 

 He came to the boathouse steps. No one was there; nothing moved. In his bulky 
sailor's coat and wool cap he was warm enough, but he shivered, standing on the 
stone steps in the darkness, waiting. 

 The boathouses loomed black above black water, and suddenly from them came 
a dull, hollow sound, a booming knock, repeated three times. Arren's hair stirred 
on his scalp. A long shadow glided out onto the water silently. It was a boat, and 
it slid softly toward the pier. Arren ran down the steps onto the pier and leapt 
down into the boat. 

 "Take the tiller," said the Archmage, a lithe, shadowy figure in the prow, 
"and hold her steady while I get the sail up." 

 They were out on the water already, the sail opening like a white wing from 
the mast, catching the growing light. "A west wind to save us rowing out of the 
bay, that's a parting gift from the Master Windkey, I don't doubt. Watch her, lad, 
she steers very light! So then. A west wind and a clear dawn for the Balance-Day 
of spring." 

 "Is this boat Lookfar?" Arren had heard of the Archmage's boat in songs and 
tales. 

 "Aye," said the other, busy with ropes. The boat bucked and veered as the 
wind freshened; Arren set his teeth and tried to keep her steady. 

 "She steers very light, but somewhat willful, lord." 

 The Archmage laughed. "Let her have her will; she is wise also. Listen, 
Arren," and he paused, kneeling on the thwart to face Arren, "I am no lord now, 
nor you a prince. I am a trader called Hawk, and you're my nephew, learning the 
seas with me, called Arren; for we hail from Enlad. From what town? A large one, 
lest we meet a townsman." 

 "Temere, on the south coast? They trade to all the Reaches." 

 The Archmage nodded. 

 "But," said Arren cautiously, "you don't have quite the accent of Enlad." 

 "I know. I have a Gontish accent," his companion said, and laughed, looking 
up at the brightening east. "But I think I can borrow what I need from you. So we 
come from Temere in our boat Dolphin, and I am neither lord nor mage nor Sparrowhawk, 
but- how am I called?" 

 "Hawk, my lord." 

 Then Arren bit his tongue. 

 "Practice, nephew," said the Archmage. "It takes practice. You've never been 
anything but a prince. While I have been many things, and last of all, and maybe 
least, an Archmage... We go south looking for emmelstone, that blue stuff they carve 
charms of. I know they value it in Enlad. They make it into charms against rheums, 
sprains, stiff necks, and slips of the tongue." 

 After a moment Arren laughed, and as he lifted his head, the boat lifted on 
a long wave, and he saw the rim of the sun against the edge of the ocean, a flare 
of sudden gold, before them. 

 Sparrowhawk stood with one hand on the mast, for the little boat leapt on 
the choppy waves, and facing the sunrise of the equinox of spring he chanted. Arren 
did not know the Old Speech, the tongue of wizards and dragons, but he heard praise 
and rejoicing in the words, and there was a great striding rhythm in them like the 
rise and fall of tides or the balance of the day and night each succeeding each 
forever. Gulls cried on the wind, and the shores of Thwil Bay slid past to right 
and left, and they entered on the long waves, full of light, of the Inmost Sea. 


 From Roke to Hort Town is no great voyage, but they spent three nights at 
sea. The Archmage had been urgent to be gone, but once gone, he was more than patient. 
The winds turned contrary as soon as they were away from the charmed weather of 
Roke, but he did not call a magewind into their sail, as any weatherworker could 
have done; instead, he spent hours teaching Arren how to manage the boat in a stiff 
headwind, in the rock-fanged sea east of Issel. The second night out it rained, 
the rough, cold rain of March, but he said no spell to keep it off them. On the 
next night, as they lay outside the entrance to Hort Harbor in a calm, cold, foggy 
darkness, Arren thought about this, and reflected that in the short time he had 
known him, the Archmage had done no magic at all. 

 He was a peerless sailor, though. Arren had learned more in three days' 
sailing with him than in ten years of boating and racing on Berila Bay. And mage 
and sailor are not so far apart; both work with the powers of sky and sea, and bend 
great winds to the uses of their hands, bringing near what was remote. Archmage 
or Hawk the sea-trader, it came to much the same thing. 

 He was a rather silent man, though perfectly goodhumored. No clumsiness of 
Arren's fretted him; he was companionable; there could be no better shipmate, Arren 
thought. But he would go into his own thoughts and be silent for hours on end, and 
then when he spoke there was a harshness in his voice, and he would look right through 
Arren. This did not weaken the love the boy felt for him, but maybe it lessened 
liking somewhat; it was a little awesome. Perhaps Sparrowhawk felt this, for in 
that foggy night off the shores of Wathort he began to talk to Arren, rather 
haltingly, about himself. "I do not want to go among men again tomorrow," he said. 
"I've been pretending that I am free... That nothing's wrong in the world. That 
I'm not Archmage, not even sorcerer. That I'm Hawk of Temere, without 
responsibilities or privileges, owing nothing to anyone..." He stopped and after 
a while went on, "Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be 
made. When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of 
doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each 
act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet 
again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act 
and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are." 

 How could such a man, thought Arren, be in doubt as to who and what he was? 
He had believed such doubts were reserved for the young, who had not done anything 
yet. 

 The boat rocked in the great, cool darkness. 

 "That's why I like the sea," said Sparrowhawk's voice in that darkness. 

 Arren understood him; but his own thoughts ran ahead, as they had been doing 
all these three days and nights, to their quest, the aim of their sailing. And since 
his companion was in a mood to talk at last, he asked, "Do you think we will find 
what we seek in Hort Town?" 

 Sparrowhawk shook his head, perhaps meaning no, perhaps meaning that he did 
not know. 

 "Can it be a kind of pestilence, a plague, that drifts from land to land, 
blighting the crops and the flocks and men's spirits?" 

 "A pestilence is a motion of the great Balance, of the Equilibrium itself; 
this is different. There is the stink of evil in it. We may suffer for it when the 
balance of things rights itself, but we do not lose hope and forego art and forget 
the words of the Making. Nature is not unnatural. This is not a righting of the 
balance, but an upsetting of it. There is only one creature who can do that." 

 "A man?" Arren said, tentative. 

 "We men." 

 "How?" 

 "By an unmeasured desire for life." 

 "For life? But it isn't wrong to want to live?" 

 "No. But when we crave power over life -endless wealth, unassailable safety, 
immortality- then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, 


then comes evil. Then the balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy 
in the scale." 

 Arren brooded over this a while and said at last, "Then you think it is a 
man we seek?" 

 "A man, and a mage. Aye, I think so." 

 "But I had thought, from what my father and teachers taught, that the great 
arts of wizardry were dependent on the Balance, the Equilibrium of things, and so 
could not be used for evil." 

 "That," said Sparrowhawk somewhat wryly, "is a debatable point. Infinite are 
the arguments of mages... Every land of Earthsea knows of witches who cast unclean 
spells, sorcerers who use their art to win riches. But there is more. The Firelord, 
who sought to undo the darkness and stop the sun at noon, was a great mage; even 
Erreth-Akbe could scarcely defeat him. The Enemy of Morred was another such. Where 
he came, whole cities knelt to him; armies fought for him. The spell he wove against 
Morred was so mighty that even when he was slain it could not be halted, and the 
island of Solea was overwhelmed by the sea, and all on it perished. Those were men 
in whom great strength and knowledge served the will to evil and fed upon it. Whether 
the wizardry that serves a better end may always prove the stronger, we do not know. 
We hope." 

 There is a certain bleakness in finding hope where one expected certainty. 
Arren found himself unwilling to stay on these cold summits. He said after a little 
while, "I see why you say that only men do evil, I think. Even sharks are innocent; 
they kill because they must." 

 "That is why nothing else can resist us. Only one thing in the world can resist 
an evil-hearted man. And that is another man. In our shame is our glory. Only our 
spirit, which is capable of evil, is capable of overcoming it!, 

 "But the dragons," said Arren. "Do they not do great evil? Are they innocent?" 

 "The dragons! The dragons are avaricious, insatiable, treacherous; without 
pity, without remorse. But are they evil? Who am I, to judge the acts of dragons?... 
They are wiser than men are. It is with them as with dreams, Arren. We men dream 
dreams, we work magic, we do good, we do evil. The dragons do not dream. They are 
dreams. They do not work magic: it is their substance, their being. They do not 
do; they are." 

 "In Serilune," said Arren, "is the skin of Bar Oth, killed by Keor, Prince 
of Enlad, three hundred years ago. No dragons have ever come to Enlad since that 
day. I saw the skin of Bar Oth. It is heavy as iron and so large that if it were 
spread out it would cover all the marketplace of Serilune, they said. The teeth 
are as long as my forearm. Yet they said Bar Oth was a young dragon, not full-grown." 

 "There is a desire in you," said Sparrowhawk, "to see dragons." 

 "Yes." 

 "Their blood is cold and venomous. You must not look into their eyes. They 
are older than mankind..." He was silent a while and then went on, "And though I 
came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I 
saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would 
be content." 

 Both were silent then, and there was no sound but the whispering of the water 
with the boat, and no light. So at last, there on the deep waters, they slept. 

 

 In the bright haze of morning they came into Hort Harbor, where a hundred 
craft were moored or setting forth: fishermen's boats, crabbers, trawlers, 
trading-ships, two galleys of twenty oars, one great sixty-oared galley in bad 
repair, and some lean, long sailing-ships with high triangular sails designed to 
catch the upper airs in the hot calms of the South Reach. "Is that a ship of war?" 
Arren asked as they passed one of the twenty-oared galleys, and his companion 
answered, "A slaver, I judge from the chainbolts in her hold. They sell men in the 
South Reach." 

 Arren pondered this a minute, then went to the gear-box and took from it his 


sword, which he had wrapped well and stowed away on the morning of their departure. 
He uncovered it; he stood indecisive, the sheathed sword on his two hands, the belt 
dangling from it. 

 "It's no sea-trader's sword," he said "The scabbard is too fine." 

 Sparrowhawk, busy at the tiller, shot him a look "Wear it if you like." 

 "I thought it might be wise." 

 "As swords go, that one is wise," said his companion, his eyes alert on their 
passage through the crowded bay. "Is it not a sword reluctant to be used?" 

 Arren nodded. "So they say. Yet it has killed. It has killed men." He looked 
down at the slender, handworn hilt. "It has, but I have not. It makes me feel a 
fool. It is too much older than I... I shall take my knife," he ended, and rewrapping 
the sword, shoved it down deep in the gear-box. His face was perplexed and angry. 
Sparrowhawk said nothing till he asked, "Will you take the oars now, lad? We're 
heading for the pier there by the stairs." 

 Hort Town, one of the Seven Great Ports of the Archipelago, rose from its 
noisy waterfront up the slopes of three steep hills in a jumble of color. The houses 
were of clay plastered in red, orange, yellow, and white; the roofs were of 
purplish-red tile; pendick-trees in flower made masses of dark red along the upper 
streets. Gaudy, striped awnings stretched from roof to roof, shading narrow 
marketplaces. The quays were bright with sunlight; the streets running back from 
the waterfront were like dark slots full of shadows and people and noise. 

 When they had tied up the boat, Sparrowhawk stooped over beside Arren as if 
to check the knot, and he said, "Arren, there are people in Wathort who know me 
pretty well; so watch me, that you may know me." When he straightened up there was 
no scar on his face. His hair was quite grey; his nose was thick and somewhat snubbed; 
and instead of a yewstaff his own height, he carried a wand of ivory, which he tucked 
away inside his shirt. "Dost know me?" he said to Arren with a broad smile, and 
he spoke with the accent of Enlad. "Hast never seen thy nuncle before this?" 

 Arren had seen wizards at the court of Berila change their faces when they 
mimed the Deed of Morred, and knew it was only illusion; he kept his wits about 
him, and was able to say, "Oh aye, nuncle Hawk!" 

 But, while the mage dickered with a harbor guardsman over the fee for docking 
and guarding the boat, Arren kept looking at him to make sure that he did know him. 
And as he looked, the transformation troubled him more, not less. It was too complete; 
this was not the Archmage at all, this was no wise guide and leader... The 
guardsman's fee was high, and Sparrowhawk grumbled as he paid, and strode away with 
Arren, still grumbling. "A test of my patience," he said. "Pay that swag-bellied 
thief to guard my boat! When half a spell would do twice the job! Well, this is 
the price of disguise... And I've forgot my proper speech, have I not, nevvy?" 

 They were walking up a crowded, smelly, gaudy street lined with shops, little 
more than booths, whose owners stood in the doorways among heaps and festoons of 
wares, loudly proclaiming the beauty and cheapness of their pots, hosiery, hats, 
spades, pins, purses, kettles, baskets, firehooks, knives, ropes, bolts, 
bed-linens, and every other kind of hardware and drygoods. 

 "Is it a fair?" 

 "Eh?" said the snub-nosed man, bending his grizzled head. 

 "Is it a fair, nuncle?" 

 "Fair? No, no. They keep it up all year round, here. Keep your fishcakes, 
mistress, I have breakfasted!" And Arren tried to shake off a man with a tray of 
little brass vases, who followed at his heels whining, "Buy, try, handsome young 
master, they won't fail you, breath as sweet as the roses of Numima, charming the 
women to you, try them, young sealord, young prince..." 

 All at once Sparrowhawk was between Arren and the peddler, saying, "What 
charms are these?" 

 "Not charms!" the man whined, shrinking away from him. "I sell no charms, 
sea-master! Only syrups to sweeten the breath after drink or hazia-root - only 
syrups, great prince!" He cowered right down onto the pavement stones, his tray 


of vases clinking and clattering, some of them tipping so that a drop of the sticky 
stuff inside oozed out, pink or purple, over the lip. 

 Sparrowhawk turned away without speaking and went on with Arren. Soon the 
crowds thinned and the shops grew wretchedly poor, little kennels displaying as 
all their wares a handful of bent nails, a broken pestle, and an old cardingcomb. 
This poverty disgusted Arren less than the rest; in the rich end of the street he 
had felt choked, suffocated, by the pressure of things to be sold and voices 
screaming to him to buy, buy. And the peddler's abjectness had shocked him. He 
thought of the cool, bright streets of his Northern town. No man in Berila, he 
thought, would have grovelled to a stranger like that. "These are a foul folk!" 
he said. 

 "This way, nevvy," was all his companion's answer. They turned aside into 
a passage between high, red, windowless house walls, which ran along the hillside 
and through an archway garlanded with decaying banners, out again into the sunlight 
in a steep square, another marketplace, crowded with booths and stalls and swarming 
with people and flies. 

 Around the edges of the square, a number of men and women were sitting or 
lying on their backs, motionless. Their mouths had a curious blackish look, as if 
they had been bruised, and around their lips flies swarmed and gathered in clusters 
like bunches of dried currants. 

 "So many," said Sparrowhawk's voice, low and hasty as if he too had gotten 
a shock; but when Arren looked at him there was the blunt, bland face of the hearty 
trader Hawk, showing no concern. 

 "What's wrong with those people?" 

 "Hazia. It soothes and numbs, letting the body be free of the mind. And the 
mind roams free. But when it returns to the body it needs more hazia... And the 
craving grows and the life is short, for the stuff is poison. First there is a 
trembling, and later paralysis, and then death." 

 Arren looked at a woman sitting with her back to a sunwarmed wall; she had 
raised her hand as if to brush away the flies from her face, but the hand made a 
jerky, circular motion in the air, as if she had quite forgotten about it and it 
was moved only by the repeated surging of a palsy or shaking in the muscles. The 
gesture was like an incantation emptied of all intention, a spell without meaning. 

 Hawk was looking at her too, expressionless. "Come on!" he said. 

 He led on across the marketplace to an awning-shaded booth. Stripes of 
sunlight colored green, orange, lemon, crimson, azure, fell across the cloths and 
shawls and woven belts displayed, and danced multitudinous in the tiny mirrors that 
bedecked the high, feathered headdress of the woman who sold the stuff. She was 
big and she chanted in a big voice, "Silks, satins, canvases, furs, felts, woollens, 
fleecefells of Gont, gauzes of Sowl, silks of Lorbanery! Hey, you Northern men, 
take off your duffle-coats; don't you see the sun's out? How's this to take home 
to a girl in far Havnor? Look at it, silk of the South, fine as the mayfly's wing!" 
She had flipped open with deft hands a bolt of gauzy silk, pink shot with threads 
of silver. 

 "Nay, mistress, we're not wed to queens," said Hawk, and the woman's voice 
rose to a blare: "So what do you dress your womenfolk in, burlap? sailcloth? Misers 
that won't buy a bit of silk for a poor woman freezing in the everlasting Northern 
snow! How's this then, a Gontish fleecefell, to help you keep her warm on winter 
nights!" She flung out over the counterboard a great cream and brown square, woven 
of the silky hair of the goats of the northeastern isles. The pretended trader put 
out his hand and felt it, and he smiled. 

 "Aye, you're a Gontishman?" said the blaring voice, and the headdress nodding 
sent a thousand colored dots spinning over the canopy and the cloth. 

 "This is Andradean work; see? There's but four warpstrings to the finger's 
width. Gont uses six or more. But tell me why you've turned from working magic to 
selling fripperies. When I was here years since, I saw you pulling flames out of 
men's ears, and then you made the flames turn into birds and golden bells, and that 


was a finer trade than this one." 

 "It was no trade at all," the big woman said, and for a moment Arren was aware 
of her eyes, hard and steady as agates, looking at him and Hawk from out of the 
glitter and restlessness of her nodding feathers and flashing mirrors. 

 "It was pretty, that pulling fire out of ears," said Hawk in a dour but 
simple-minded tone. "I thought to show it to my nevvy." 

 "Well now, look you," said the woman less harshly, leaning her broad, brown 
arms and heavy bosom on the counter. "We don't do those tricks any more. People 
don't want 'em. They've seen through 'em. These mirrors now, I see you remember 
my mirrors," and she tossed her head so that the reflected dots of colored light 
whirled dizzily about them. "Well, you can puzzle a man's mind with the flashing 
of the Mirrors and with words and with other tricks I won't tell you, till he thinks 
he sees what he don't see, what isn't there. Like the flames and golden bells, or 
the S't of clothes I used to deck sailormen in, cloth of 

In s gold with diamonds like apricots, and off they'd swagger like the King of All 
the Isles .... But it was tricks, fooleries. You can fool men. They're like chickens 
charmed by a snake, by a finger held before 'em. Men are like chickens. But then 
in the end they know they've been fooled and fuddled and they get angry and lose 
their pleasure in such things. So I turned to this trade, and maybe all the silks 
aren't silks nor all the fleeces Gontish, but all the same they'll wearthey'll wearl 
They're real and not mere lies and air like the suits of cloth of gold." 

 

 "Well, well," said Hawk, "then there's none left in all Hort Town to pull 
fire out of ears, or do any magic like they did?" 

 At his last words the woman frowned; she straightened up and began to fold 
the fleecefell carefully. "Those who want lies and visions chew hazia," she said. 
"Talk to them if you like!" She nodded at the unmoving figures around the square. 

 "But there were sorcerers, they that charmed the winds for seamen and put 
spells of fortune on their cargoes. Are they all turned to other trades?" 

 But she in sudden fury came blaring in over his words, "There's a sorcerer 
if you want one, a great one, a wizard with a staff and all-see him there? He sailed 
with Egre himself, making winds and finding fat galleys, so he said, but it was 
all lies, and Captain Egre gave him his just reward at last; he cut his right hand 
off. And there he sits now, see him, with his mouth full of hazia and his belly 
full of air. Air and liesl Air and liesl That's all there is to your magic, Seacaptain 
Goad" 

 "Well, well, mistress," said Hawk with obdurate mildness, "I was only 
asking." She turned her broad back with a great, dazzle of whirling mirror-dots, 
and he ambled off, Arren beside him. 

 His amble was purposeful. It brought them near the man she had pointed out. 
He sat propped against a wall, staring at nothing; the dark, bearded face had been 
very handsome once. The wrinkled wrist-stump lay on the pavement stones in the hot, 
bright sunlight, shameful. 

 There was some commotion among the booths behind them, but Arren found it 
hard to look away from the man; a loathing fascination held him. "Was he really 
a wizard?" he asked very low. 

 "He may be the one called Hare, who was weatherworker for the pirate Egre. 
They were famous thieves -Here, stand clear, Arrenl" A man running full-tilt out 
from among the booths nearly slammed into them both. Another came trotting by, 
struggling under the weight of a great folding tray loaded with cords and braids 
and laces. A booth collapsed with a crash; awnings were being pushed over or taken 
down hurriedly; knots of people shoved and wrestled through the marketplace; voices 
rose in shouts and screams. Above them all rang the blaring yell of the woman with 
the headdress of mirrors. Arren glimpsed her wielding some kind of pole or stick 
against a bunch of men, fending them off with great sweeps like a swordsman at bay.. 
Whether it was a quarrel that had spread and become a riot, or an attack by a gang 
of thieves, or a fight between two rival lots of peddlers, there was no telling. 


People rushed by with armfuls of goods that could be loot or their own property 
saved from looting. There were knifefights, fist-fights, and brawls all over the 
square. "That way," said Arren, pointing to a side street that led out of the square 
near them. He started for the street, for it was clear that they had better get 
out at once, but his companion caught his arm. Arren looked back and saw that the 
man Hare was struggling to his feet. When he got himself erect, he stood swaying 
a moment, and then without a look around him set off around the edge of the square, 
trailing his single hand along the house walls as if to guide or support himself. 
"Keep him in sight," Sparrowhawk said, and they set off following. No one molested 
them or the man they followed, and in a minute they were out of the marketsquare, 
going downhill in the silence of a narrow, twisting street. 

 Overhead the attics of the houses almost met across the street, cutting out 
light; underfoot the stones were slippery with water and refuse. Hare went along 
at a good pace, though he kept trailing his hand along the walls like a blind man. 
They had to keep pretty close behind him lest they lose him at a cross-street. The 
excitement of the chase came into Arren suddenly; his senses were all alert, as 
they were during a stag-hunt in the forests of Enlad; he saw vividly each face they 
passed, and breathed in the sweet stink of the city: a smell of garbage, incense, 
carrion, and flowers. As they threaded their way across a broad, crowded street 
he heard a drum beat and caught a glimpse of a line of naked men and women, chained 
each to the next by wrist and waist, matted hair hanging over their faces: one 
glimpse and they were gone, as he dodged after Hare down a flight of steps and out 
into a narrow square, empty but for a few women gossiping at the fountain. 

 There Sparrowhawk caught up with Hare and set a hand on his shoulder, at which 
Hare cringed as if scalded, wincing away, and backed into the shelter of a massive 
doorway. There he stood shivering and stared at them with the unseeing eyes of the 
hunted. 

 "Are you called Hare?" asked Sparrowhawk, and he spoke in his own voice, which 
was harsh in quality, but gentle in intonation. The man said nothing, seeming not 
to heed or not to hear. "I want something of you," Sparrowhawk said. Again no 
response. "I'll pay for it." 

 A slow reaction: "Ivory or gold?" 

 "Gold." 

 "How much?" 

 "The wizard knows the spell's worth." 

 Hare's face flinched and changed, coming alive for an instant, so quickly 
that it seemed to flicker, then clouding again into blankness. "That's all gone," 
he said, "all gone." A coughing fit bent him over; he spat black. When he 
straightened up he stood passive, shivering, seeming to have forgotten what they 
were talking about. 

 Again Arren watched him in fascination. The angle in which he stood was formed 
by two giant figures flanking a doorway, statues whose necks were bowed under the 
weight of a pediment and whose knotmuscled bodies emerged only partially from the 
wall, as if they had tried to struggle out of stone into life and had failed part 
way. The door they guarded was rotten on its hinges; the house, once a palace, was 
derelict. The gloomy, bulging faces of the giants were chipped and lichen-grown. 
Between these ponderous figures the man called Hare stood slack and fragile, his 
eyes as dark as the windows of the empty house. He lifted up his maimed arm between 
himself and Sparrowhawk and whined, "Spare a little for a poor cripple, master..." 

 The mage scowled as if in pain or shame; Arren felt he had seen his true face 
for a moment under the disguise. He put his hand again on Hare's shoulder and said 
a few words, softly, in the wizardly tongue that Arren did not understand. 

 But Hare understood. He clutched at Sparrowhawk with his one hand and 
stammered, "You can still speak- speak- Come with me, come-" 

 The mage glanced at Arren, then nodded. 

 They went down by steep streets into one of the valleys between Hort Town's 
three hills. The ways became narrower, darker, quieter as they descended. The sky 


was a pale strip between the overhanging eaves, and the house walls to either hand 
were dank. At the bottom of the gorge a stream ran, stinking like an open sewer; 
between arched bridges, houses crowded along the banks. Into the dark doorway of 
one of these houses Hare turned aside, vanishing like a candle blown out. They 
followed him. 

 The unlit stairs creaked and swayed under their feet. At the head of the stairs 
Hare pushed open a door, and they could see where they were: an empty room with 
a strawstuffed mattress in one corner and one unglazed, shuttered window that let 
in a little dusty light. 

 Hare turned to face Sparrowhawk and caught at his arm again. His lips worked. 
He said at last, stammering, "Dragon... dragon..." 

 Sparrowhawk returned his look steadily, saying nothing. 

 "I cannot speak," Hare said, and he let go his hold on Sparrowhawk's arm and 
crouched down on the empty floor, weeping. 

 The mage knelt by him and spoke to him softly in the Old Speech. Arren stood 
by the shut door, his hand on his knife-hilt. The grey light and the dusty room, 
the two kneeling figures, the soft, strange sound of the mage's voice speaking the 
language of the dragons, all came together as does a dream, having no relation to 
what happens outside it or to time passing. 

 Slowly Hare stood up. He dusted his knees with his single hand and hid the 
maimed arm behind his back. He looked around him, looked at Arren; he was seeing 
what he looked at now. He turned away presently and sat down on his mattress. Arren 
remained standing, on guard; but, with the simplicity of one whose childhood had 
been totally without furnishings, Sparrowhawk sat down cross-legged on the bare 
floor. "Tell me how you lost your craft and the language of your craft," he said. 

 Hare did not answer for a while. He began to beat his mutilated arm against 
his thigh in a restless, jerky way, and at last he said, forcing the words out in 
bursts, "They cut off my hand. I can't weave the spells. They cut off my hand. The 
blood ran out, ran dry." 

 "But that was after you'd lost your power, Hare, or else they could not have 
done it." 

 "Power..." 

 "Power over the winds and the waves and men. You called them by their names 
and they obeyed you. " 

 "Yes. I remember being alive," the man said in a soft, hoarse voice. "And 
I knew the words and the names..." 

 "Are you dead now?" 

 "No. Alive. Alive. Only once I was a dragon... I'm not dead. I sleep sometimes. 
Sleep comes very close to death, everyone knows that. The dead walk in dreams, 
everyone knows that. They come to you alive, and they say things. They walk out 
of death into the dreams. There's a way. And if you go on far enough there's a way 
back all the way. All the way. You can find it if you know where to look. And if 
you're willing to pay the price." 

 "What price is that?" Sparrowhawk's voice floated on the dim air like the 
shadow of a falling leaf. 

 "Life- what else? What can you buy life with, but life?" Hare rocked back 
and forth on his pallet, a cunning, uncanny brightness in his eyes. "You see," he 
said, "they can cut off my hand. They can cut off my head. It doesn't matter. I 
can find the way back. I know where to look. Only men of power can go there." 

 "Wizards, you mean?" 

 "Yes." Hare hesitated, seeming to attempt the word several times; he could 
not say it. "Men of power," he repeated. "And they must- and they must give it up. 
Pay." 

 Then he fell sullen, as if the word "pay" had at last roused associations, 
and he had realized that he was giving information away instead of selling it. 
Nothing more could be got from him, not even the hints and stammers about "a way 
back" which Sparrowhawk seemed to find meaningful, and soon enough the mage stood 


up "Well, half-answers beat no answers," he said, "and the same with payment," and, 
deft as a conjuror, he flipped a gold piece onto the pallet in front of Hare. 

 Hare picked it up. He looked at it and Sparrowhawk and Arren, with jerky 
movements of his head. "Wait," he stammered. As soon as the situation changed he 
lost his grip of it and now groped miserably after what he wanted to say. "Tonight," 
he said at last. "Wait. Tonight. I have hazia." 

 "I don't need it." 

 "To show you- To show you the way. Tonight. I'll take you. I'll show you. 
You can get there, because you... you're..." He groped for the word until 
Sparrowhawk said, "I am a wizard." 

 "Yes! So we can- we can get there. To the way. When I dream. In the dream. 
See? I'll take you. You'll go with me, to the... to the way." 

 Sparrowhawk stood, solid and pondering, in the middle of the dim room. 
"Maybe," he said at last. "If we come, we'll be here by dark." Then he turned to 
Arren, who opened the door at once, eager to be gone. 

 The dank, overshadowed street seemed bright as a garden after Hare's room. 
They struck out for the upper city by the shortest way, a steep stairway of stone 
between ivy-grown house walls. Arren breathed in and out like a sea lion- "Ugh!- 
Are you going back there?" 

 "Well, I will, if I can't get the same information from a less risky source. 
He's likely to set an ambush for us." 

 "But aren't you defended against thieves and so on?" 

 "Defended?" said Sparrowhawk. "What do you mean? D'you think I go about 
wrapped up in spells like an old woman afraid of the rheumatism? I haven't the time 
for it. I hide my face to hide our quest; that's all. We can look out for each other. 
But the fact is we're not going to be able to keep out of danger on this journey." 

 "Of course not," Arren said stiffly, angry, angered in his pride. "I did not 
seek to do so." 

 "That's just as well," the mage said, inflexible, and yet with a kind of good 
humor that appeased Arren's temper. Indeed he was startled by his own anger; he 
had never thought to speak thus to the Archmage. But then, this was and was not 
the Archmage, this Hawk with the snubbed nose and square, ill-shaven cheeks, whose 
voice was sometimes one man's voice and sometimes another's: a stranger, 
unreliable. 

 "Does it make sense, what he told you?" Arren asked, for he did not look 
forward to going back to that dim room above the stinking river. "All that 
fiddle-faddle about being alive and dead and coming back with his head cut off?" 

 "I don't know if it makes sense. I wanted to talk with a wizard who had lost 
his power. He says that he hasn't lost it but given it traded it. For what? Life 
for life, he said. Power for power. No, I don't understand him, but he is worth 
listening to." 

 Sparrowhawk's steady reasonableness shamed Arren further. He felt himself 
petulant and nervous, like a child. Hare had fascinated him, but now that the 
fascination was broken he felt a sick disgust, as if he had eaten something vile. 
He resolved not to speak again until he had controlled his temper. Next moment he 
missed his step on the worn, slick stairs, slipped, recovered himself scraping his 
hands on the stones. "Oh curse this filthy town!" he broke out in rage. And the 
mage replied dryly, "No need to, I think." 

 There was indeed something wrong about Hort Town, wrong in the very air, so 
that one might think seriously that it lay under a curse; and yet this was not a 
presence of any quality, but rather an absence, a weakening of all qualities, like 
a sickness that soon infected the spirit of any visitor. Even the warmth of the 
afternoon sun was sickly, too heavy a heat for March. The squares and streets bustled 
with activity and business, but there was neither order nor prosperity. Goods were 
poor, prices high, and the markets were unsafe for vendors and buyers alike, being 
full of thieves and roaming gangs. Not many women were on the streets, and the few 
there were appeared mostly in groups. It was a city without law or governance. 


Talking with people, Arren and Sparrowhawk soon learned that there was in fact no 
council or mayor or lord left in Hort Town. Some of those who had used to rule the 
city had died, and some had resigned, and some had been assassinated; various chiefs 
lorded it over various quarters of the city, the harbor guardsmen ran the port and 
lined their pockets, and so on. 

 There was no center left to the city. The people, for all their restless 
activity, seemed purposeless. Craftsmen seemed to lack the will to work well; even 
the robbers robbed because it was all they knew how to do. All the brawl and 
brightness of a great port-city was there, on the surface, but all about the edges 
of it sat the hazia-eaters, motionless. And under the surface, things did not seem 
entirely real, not even the faces, the sounds, the smells. They would fade from 
time to time during that long, warm afternoon while Sparrowhawk and Arren walked 
the streets and talked with this person and that. They would fade quite away. The 
striped awnings, the dirty cobbles, the colored walls, and all the vividness of 
being would be gone, leaving the city a dream city, empty and dreary in the hazy 
sunlight. 

 Only at the top of the town where they went to rest a while in late afternoon 
did this sickly mood of daydream break for a while. "This is not a town for luck," 
Sparrowhawk had said some hours ago, and now after hours of aimless wandering and 
fruitless conversations with strangers, he looked tired and grim. His disguise was 
wearing a little thin; a certain hardness and darkness could be seen through the 
bluff sea-trader's face. Arren had not been able to shake off the morning's 
irritability. They sat down on the coarse turf of the hilltop under the leaves of 
a grove of pendick trees, dark-leaved and budded thickly with red buds, some open. 
From there they saw nothing of the city but its tile roofs multitudinously scaling 
downward to the sea. The bay opened its arms wide, slate blue beneath the spring 
haze, reaching on to the edge of air. No lines were drawn, no boundaries. They sat 
gazing at that immense blue space. Arren's mind cleared, opening out to meet and 
celebrate the world. 

 When they went to drink from a little stream nearby, running clear over brown 
rocks from its spring in some princely garden on the hill behind them, he drank 
deep and doused his head right under the cold water. Then he got up and declaimed 
the lines from the Deed of Morred, 

 

 Praised are the Fountains of Shelieth, the silver harp of the waters, 

 But blest in my name forever this stream that stanched my thirst! 

 

Sparrowhawk laughed at him, and he also laughed. He shook his head like a dog, and 
the bright spray flew out fine in the last gold sunlight. 

 They had to leave the grove and go down into the streets again, and when they 
had made their supper at a stall that sold greasy fishcakes, night was getting heavy 
in the air. Darkness came fast in the narrow streets. "We'd better go, lad," said 
Sparrowhawk, and Arren, said, "To the boat?" but knew it was not to the boat but 
to the house above the river and the empty, dusty, terrible room. 

 Hare was waiting for them in the doorway. 

 He lighted an oil lamp to show them up the black stairs. Its tiny flame 
trembled continually as he held it, throwing vast, quick shadows up the walls. 

 He had got another sack of straw for his visitors to sit on, but Arren took 
his place on the bare floor by the door. The door opened outward, and to guard it 
he should have sat himself down outside it: but that pitch-black hall was more than 
he could stand, and he wanted to keep an eye on Hare. Sparrowhawk's attention and 
perhaps his powers were going to be turned on what Hare had to tell him or show 
him; it was up to Arren to keep alert for trickery. 

 Hare held himself straighter and trembled less, he had cleaned his mouth and 
teeth; he spoke sanely enough at first, though with excitement. His eyes in the 
lamplight were so dark that they seemed, like the eyes of animals, to show no whites. 
He disputed earnestly with Sparrowhawk, urging him to eat hazia. "I want to take 


you, take you with me. We've got to go the same way. Before long I'll be going, 
whether you're ready or not. You must have the hazia to follow me." 

 "I think I can follow you." 

 "Not where I'm going. This isn't... spell-casting." He seemed unable to say 
the words "wizard" or "wizardry." "I know you can get to the- the place, you know, 
the wall. But it isn't there. It's a different way." 

 "If you go, I can follow." 

 Hare shook his head. His handsome, ruined face was flushed; he glanced over 
at Arren often, including him, though he spoke only to Sparrowhawk. "Look: there 
are two kinds of men, aren't there? Our kind and the rest. The... the dragons and 
the others. People without power are only half-alive. They don't count. They don't 
know what they dream; they're afraid of the dark. But the others, the lords of men, 
aren't afraid to go into the dark. We have strength." 

 "So long as we know the names of things." 

 "But names don't matter there- that's the point, that's the point! It isn't 
what you do, what you know, that you need. Spells are no good. You have to forget 
all that, to let it go. That's where eating hazia helps; you forget the names, you 
let the forms of things go, you go straight to the reality. I'm going to be going 
pretty soon now; if you want to find out where, you ought to do as I say. I say 
as he does. You must be a lord of men to be a lord of life. You have to find the 
secret. I could tell you its name but what's a name? A name isn't real, the real, 
the real forever. Dragons can't go there. Dragons die. They all die. I took so much 
tonight you'll never catch me. Not a patch on me. Where I get lost you can lead 
me. Remember what the secret is? Remember? No death. No death -no! No sweaty bed 
and rotting coffin, no more, never. The blood dries up like the dry river and it's 
gone. No fear. No death. The names are gone and the words and the fear, gone. Show 
me where I get lost, show me, lord... " 

 So he went on, in a choked rapture of words that was like the chanting of 
a spell, and yet made no spell, no whole, no sense. Arren listened, listened, 
striving to understand. If only he could understand! Sparrowhawk should do as he 
said and take the drug, this once, so that he could find out what Hare was talking 
about, the mystery that he would not or could not speak. Why else were they here? 
But then (Arren looked from Hare's ecstatic face to the other profile) perhaps the 
mage understood already... Hard as rock, that profile. Where was the snubbed nose, 
the bland look? Hawk the sea-trader was gone, forgotten. It was the mage, the 
Archmage, who sat there. 

 Hare's voice now was a crooning mumble, and he rocked his body as he sat 
cross-legged. His face had grown haggard and his mouth slack. Facing him, in the 
tiny, steady light of the oil lamp set on the floor between them, the other never 
spoke, but he had reached out and taken Hare's hand, holding him. Arren had not 
seen him reach out. There were gaps in the order of events, gaps of nonexistencedrowsiness, 
it must be. Surely some hours had passed; it might be near midnight. 
If he slept, would he too be able to follow Hare into his dream and come to the 
place, the secret way? Perhaps he could. It seemed quite possible now. But he was 
to guard the door. He and Sparrowhawk had scarcely spoken of it, but both were aware 
that in having them come back at night Hare might have planned some ambush; he had 
been a pirate; he knew robbers. They had said nothing, but Arren knew that he was 
to stand guard, for while the mage made this strange journey of the spirit he would 
be defenseless. But like a fool he had left his sword on board the boat, and how 
much good would his knife be if that door swung suddenly open behind him? But that 
would not happen: he could listen and hear. Hare was not speaking any more. Both 
men were utterly silent; the whole house was silent. Nobody could come up those 
swaying stairs without some noise. He could speak, if he heard a noise: shout aloud, 
and the trance would break, and Sparrowhawk would turn and defend himself and Arren 
with all the vengeful lightning of a wizard's rage... When Arren had sat down at 
the door, Sparrowhawk had looked at him, only a glance, approval: approval and trust. 
He was the guard. There was no danger if he kept on guard. But it was hard, hard 


to keep watching those two faces, the little pearl of the lampflame between them 
on the floor, both silent now, both still, their eyes open but not seeing the light 
or the dusty room, not seeing the world, but some other world of dream or death... 
to watch them and not to try to follow them... 

 There, in the vast, dry darkness, there one stood beckoning. Come, he said, 
the tall lord of shadows. In his hand he held a tiny flame no larger than a pearl, 
held it out to Arren, offering life. Slowly Arren took one step toward him, 
following. 

 

 

------ 

Magelight 

------ 

 

 Dry, his mouth was dry. There was the taste of dust in his mouth. His lips 
were covered with dust. 

 Without lifting his head from the floor, he watched the shadow-play. There 
were the big shadows that moved and stooped, swelled and shrank, and fainter ones 
that ran around the walls and ceiling swiftly, mocking them. There was a shadow 
in the corner and a shadow on the floor, and neither of these moved. 

 The back of his head began to hurt. At the same time, what he saw came clear 
to his mind, in one flash, frozen in an instant: Hare slumped in a corner with his 
head on his knees, Sparrowhawk sprawled on his back, a man kneeling over Sparrowhawk, 
another tossing gold pieces into a bag, a third standing watching. The third man 
held a lantern in one hand and a dagger in the other, Arren's dagger. 

 If they talked, he did not hear them. He heard only his own thoughts, which 
told him immediately and unhesitatingly what to do. He obeyed them at once. He 
crawled forward very slowly a couple of feet, darted out his left hand and grabbed 
the bag of loot, leapt to his feet, and made for the stairs with a hoarse yell. 
He plunged downstairs in the blind dark without missing a step, without even feeling 
them under his feet, as if he were flying. He broke out onto the street and ran 
full-speed into the dark. 

 The houses were black hulks against the stars. Starlight gleamed faintly on 
the river to his right, and though he could not see where the streets led, he could 
make out street-crossings and so turn and double on his track. They had followed 
him; he could hear them behind him, not very far behind. They were unshod, and their 
panting breathing was louder than their footfalls. He would have laughed if he had 
had time; he knew at last what it was like to be the hunted instead of the hunter, 
the quarry instead of the leader of the chase. It was to be alone and to be free. 
He swerved to the right and dodged stooping across a high-parapetted bridge, slipped 
into a side street, around a corner, back to the riverside and along it for a way, 
across another bridge. His shoes were loud on the cobblestones, the only sound in 
all the city; he paused at the bridge abutment to unlace them, but the strings were 
knotted, and the hunt had not lost him. The lantern glittered a second across the 
river; the soft, heavy, running feet came on. He could not get away from them. He 
could only outrun them; keep going, keep ahead, and get them away from the dusty 
room, far away... 

 They had stripped his coat off him, along with his dagger, and he was in 
shirt-sleeves, light and hot, his head swimming, and the pain in the back of his 
skull pointing and pointing with each stride, and he ran and he ran... The bag 
hindered him. He flung it down suddenly, a loose gold piece flying out and striking 
the stones with a clear ring. "Here's your money!" he yelled, his voice hoarse and 
gasping. He ran on. And all at once the street ended. No cross-streets, no stars 
before him, a dead end. Without pausing he turned back and ran at his pursuers. 
The lantern swung wild in his eyes, and he yelled defiance as he came at them. 

 

 There was a lantern swinging back and forth before him, a faint spot of light 


in a great, moving greyness. He watched it for a long time. It grew fainter, and 
at last a shadow passed before it, and when the shadow went on the light was gone. 
He grieved for it a little; or perhaps he was grieving for himself, because he knew 
he must wake up now. 

 The lantern, dead, still swung against the mast to which it was fixed. All 
around, the sea brightened with the coming sun. A drum beat. Oars creaked heavily, 
regularly; the wood of the ship cried and creaked in a hundred little voices; a 
man up in the prow called something to the sailors behind him. The men chained with 
Arren in the after hold were all silent. Each wore an iron band around his waist 
and manacles on his wrists, and both these bonds were linked by a short, heavy chain 
to the bonds of the next man; the belt of iron was also chained to a bolt in the 
deck, so that the man could sit or crouch, but could not stand. They were too close 
together to lie down, jammed together in the small cargo-hold. Arren was in the 
forward port corner. If he lifted his head high, his eyes were on a level with the 
deck between hold and rail, a couple of feet wide. 

 He did not remember much of last night past the chase and the dead-end street. 
He had fought and been knocked down and trussed up and carried somewhere. A man 
with a strange, whispering voice had spoken; there had been a place like a smithy, 
a forge-fire leaping red... He could not recall it. He knew, though, that this was 
a slave-ship, and that he had been taken to be sold. 

 It did not mean much to him. He was too thirsty. His body ached and his head 
hurt. When the sun rose the light sent lances of pain into his eyes. 

 Along in midmorning they were given a quarter-loaf of bread each and a long 
drink from a leather flask, held to their lips by a man with a sharp, hard face. 
His neck was clasped by a broad, gold-studded leather band like a dog's collar, 
and when Arren heard him speak he recognized the weak, strange, whistling voice. 

 Drink and food eased his bodily wretchedness for a while and cleared his head. 
He looked for the first time at the faces of his fellow slaves, three in his row 
and four close behind. Some sat with tbeir heads on their raised knees; one was 
slumped over, sick or drugged. The one next to Arren was a fellow of twenty or so 
with a broad, flat face. "Where are they taking us?" Arren said to him. 

 The fellow looked at him -their faces were not a foot apart- and grinned, 
shrugging, and Arren thought he meant he did not know; but then he jerked his 
manacled arms as if to gesture and opened his still-grinning mouth wide to show, 
where the tongue should be, only a black root. 

 "It'll be Showl," said one behind Arren; and another, "Or the Market at 
Amrun," and then the man with the collar, who seemed to be everywhere on the ship, 
was bending above the hold, hissing, "Be still if you don't want to be shark bait," 
and all of them were still. 

 Arren tried to imagine these places, Showl, the Market of Amrun. They sold 
slaves there. They stood them out in front of the buyers, no doubt, like oxen or 
rams for sale in Berila Marketplace. He would stand there wearing chains. Somebody 
would buy him and lead him home and they would give him an order; and he would refuse 
to obey. Or obey and try to escape. And he would be killed, one way or the other. 
It was not that his soul rebelled at the thought of slavery; he was much too sick 
and bewildered for that. It was simply that he knew he could not do it; that within 
a week or two he would die or be killed. Though he saw and accepted this as a fact, 
it frightened him, so that he stopped trying to think ahead. He stared down at the 
foul, black planking of the hold between his feet and felt the heat of the sun on 
his naked shoulders and felt the thirst drying out his mouth and narrowing his throat 
again. 

 The sun sank. Night came on clear and cold. The sharp stars came out. The 
drum beat like a slow heart, keeping the oar-stroke, for there was no breath of 
wind. Now the cold became the greatest misery. Arren's back gained a little warmth 
from the cramped legs of the man behind him and his left side from the mute beside 
him, who sat hunched up, humming a grunting rhythm all on one note. The rowers 
changed shift; the drum beat again. Arren had longed for the darkness, but he could 


not sleep. His bones ached, and he could not change position. He sat aching, 
shivering, parched, staring up at the stars, which jerked across the sky with every 
stroke the oarsmen took, slid to their places, and were still, jerked again, slid, 
paused... 

 The man with the collar and another man stood between the after hold and the 
mast; the little swinging lantern on the mast sent gleams between them and 
silhouetted their heads and shoulders. "Fog, you pig's bladder," said the weak, 
hateful voice of the man with the collar, "what's a fog doing in the Southing Straits 
this time of year? Curse the luck!" 

 The drum beat. The stars jerked, slid, paused. Beside Arren the tongueless 
man shuddered all at once and, raising his head, let out a nightmare scream, a 
terrible, formless noise. "Quiet there!" roared the second man by the mast. The 
mute shuddered again and was silent, munching with his jaws. 

 Stealthily the stars slid forward into nothingness. 

 The mast wavered and vanished. A cold, grey blanket seemed to drop over 
Arren's back. The drum faltered and then resumed its beat, but slower. 

 "Thick as curdled milk," said the hoarse voice somewhere above Arren. "Keep 
up the stroke there! There's no shoals for twenty miles!" A horny, scarred foot 
appeared out of the fog, paused an instant close to Arren's face, then with one 
step vanished. 

 In the fog there was no sense of forward motion, only of swaying and the tug 
of the oars. The throb of the stroke-drum was muffled. It was clammy cold. The mist 
condensing in Arren's hair ran down into his eyes; he tried to catch the drops with 
his tongue and breathed the damp air with open mouth, trying to assuage his thirst. 
But his teeth chattered. The cold metal of a chain swung against his thigh and burnt 
like fire where it touched. The drum beat, and beat, and ceased. 

 It was silent. 

 "Keep the beat! What's amiss?" roared the hoarse, whistling voice from the 
prow. No answer came. 

 The ship rolled a little on the quiet sea. Beyond the dim rails was nothing: 
blank. Something grated against the ship's side. The noise was loud in that dead, 
weird silence and darkness. "We're aground," one of the prisoners whispered, but 
the silence closed in on his voice. 

 The fog grew bright, as if a light were blooming in it. Arren saw the heads 
of the men chained by him clearly, the tiny moisture-drops shining in their hair. 
Again the ship swayed, and he strained as far up as his chains would let him, 
stretching his neck, to see forward in the ship. The fog glowed over the deck like 
the moon behind thin clouds, cold and radiant. The oarsmen sat like carved statues. 
Crewmen stood in the waist of the ship, their eyes shining a little. Alone on the 
port side stood a man, and it was from him that the light came, from the face and 
hands and staff that burned like molten silver. 

 At the feet of the radiant man a dark shape was crouched. 

 Arren tried to speak and could not. Clothed in that majesty of light, the 
Archmage came to him and knelt down on the deck. Arren felt the touch of his hand 
and heard his voice. He felt the bonds on his wrists and body give way; all through 
the hold there was a rattling of chains. But no man moved; only 

Arren tried to stand, but he could not, being cramped with long immobility. The 
Archmage's strong grip was on his arm, and with that help he crawled up out of the 
cargo-hold and huddled on the deck. 

 The Archmage strode away from him, and the misty splendor glowed on the 
unmoving faces of the oarsmen. He halted by the man who had crouched down by the 
port rail. 

 "I do not punish," said the hard, clear voice, cold as the cold magelight 
in the fog. "But in the cause of justice, Egre, I take this much upon myself: I 
bid your voice be dumb until the day you find a word worth speaking." 

 He came back to Arren and helped him to get to his feet. "Come on now, lad," 
he said, and with his help Arren managed to hobble forward, and half-scramble, 


half-fall down into the boat that rocked there below the ship's side: Lookfar, her 
sail like a moth's wing in the fog. 

 In the same silence and dead calm the light died away, and the boat turned 
and slipped from the ship's side. Almost at once the galley, the dim mast-lantern, 
the immobile oarsmen, the hulking black side, were gone. Arren thought he heard 
voices break out in cries, but the sound was thin and soon lost. A little longer, 
and the fog began to thin and tatter, blowing by in the dark. They came out under 
the stars, and silent as a moth Lookfar fled through the clear night over the sea. 

 Sparrowhawk had covered Arren with blankets and given him water; he sat with 
his hand on the boy's shoulder when Arren fell suddenly to weeping. Sparrowhawk 
said nothing, but there was a gentleness, a steadiness, in the touch of his hand. 
Comfort came slowly into Arren: warmth, the soft motion of the boat, heart's ease. 

 He looked up at his companion. No unearthly radiance clung to the dark face. 
He could barely see him against the stars. 

 The boat fled on, charm-guided. Waves whispered as if in surprise along her 
sides. 

 "Who is the man with the collar?" 

 "Lie still. A sea-robber, Egre. He wears that collar to hide a scar where 
his throat was slit once. It seems his trade has sunk from piracy to slaving. But 
he took the bear's cub this time." There was a slight ring of satisfaction in the 
dry, quiet voice. 

 "How did you find me?" 

 "Wizardry, bribery... I wasted time. I did not like to let it be known that 
the Archmage and Warden of Roke was ferreting about the slums of Hort Town. I wish 
still I could have kept up my disguise. But I had to track down this man and that 
man, and when at last I found that the slaver had sailed before daybreak, I lost 
my temper. I took Lookfar and spoke the wind into her sail in the dead calm of the 
day and glued the oars of every ship in that bay fast into the oarlocks- for a while. 
How they'll explain that, if wizardry's all lies and air, is their problem. But 
in my haste and anger I missed and overpassed Egre's ship, which had gone east of 
south to miss the shoals. Ill done was all I did this day. There is no luck in Hort 
Town... Well, I made a spell of finding at last, and so came on the ship in the 
darkness. Should you not sleep now?" 

 "I'm all right. I feel much better." A light fever had replaced Arren's chill, 
and he did indeed feel well, his body languid but his mind racing lightly from one 
thing to another. "How soon did you wake up? What happened to Hare?" 

 "I woke with daylight; and lucky I have a hard head; there's a lump and a 
cut like a split cucumber behind my ear. I left Hare in the drug-sleep." 

 "I failed my guard-" 

 "But not by falling asleep." 

 "No." Arren hesitated. "It was- I was-" 

 "You were ahead of me; I saw you," Sparrowhawk said strangely. "And so they 
crept in and tapped us on the head like lambs at the shambles, took gold, good 
clothes, and the salable slave, and left. It was you they were after, lad. You'd 
fetch the price of a farm in Amrun Market." 

 "They didn't tap me hard enough. I woke up. I did give them a run. I spilt 
their loot all over the street, too, before they cornered me." Arren's eyes 
glittered. 

 "You woke while they were there- and ran? Why?" 

 "To get them away from you." The surprise in Sparrowhawk's voice suddenly 
struck Arren's pride, and he added fiercely, "I thought it was you they were after. 
I thought they might kill you. I grabbed their bag so they'd follow me, and shouted 
out and ran. And they did follow me." 

 "Aye- they would!" That was all Sparrowhawk said, no word of praise, though 
he sat and thought a while. Then he said, "Did it not occur to you I might be dead 
already?" 

 "No." 


 "Murder first and rob after, is the safer course." 

 "I didn't think of that. I only thought of getting them away from you." 

 "Why?" 

 "Because you might be able to defend us, to get us both out of it, if you 
had time to wake up. Or get yourself out of it, anyway. I was on guard, and I failed 
my guard. I tried to make up for it. You are the one I was guarding. You are the 
one that matters. I'm along to guard, or whatever you need- it's you who'll lead 
us, who can get to wherever it is we must go, and put right what's gone wrong." 

 "Is it?" said the mage. "I thought so myself, until last night. I thought 
I had a follower, but I followed you, my lad." His voice was cool and perhaps a 
little ironic. Arren did not know what to say. He was indeed completely confused. 
He had thought that his fault of falling into sleep or trance on guard could scarcely 
be atoned by his feat of drawing off the robbers from Sparrowhawk: it now appeared 
that the latter had been a silly act, whereas going into trance at the wrong moment 
had been wonderfully clever. 

 "I am sorry, my lord," he said at last, his lips rather stiff and the need 
to cry not easily controlled again, "that I failed you. And you have saved my life-" 

 "And you mine, maybe," said the mage harshly. 

 "Who knows? They might have slit my throat when they were done. No more of 
that, Arren. I am glad you are with me." 

 He went to their stores-box then and lit their little charcoal stove and 
busied himself with something. Arren lay and watched the stars, and his emotions 
cooled and his mind ceased racing. And he saw then that what he had done and what 
he had not done were not going to receive judgment from Sparrowhawk. He had done 
it; Sparrowhawk accepted it as done. "I do not punish," he had said, cold-voiced, 
to Egre. Neither did he reward. But he had come for Arren in all haste across the 
sea, unleashing the power of his wizardry for his sake; and he would do so again. 
He was to be depended on. 

 He was worth all the love Arren had for him, and all the trust. For the fact 
was that he trusted Arren. What Arren did, was right. 

 He came back now, handing Arren a cup of steaming hot wine. "Maybe that'll 
put you to sleep. Take care, it'll scald your tongue." 

 "Where did the wine come from? I never saw a wineskin aboard-" 

 "There's more in Lookfar than meets the eye," Sparrowhawk said, sitting down 
again beside him, and Arren heard him laugh, briefly and almost silently, in the 
dark. 

 Arren sat up to drink the wine. It was very good, refreshing body and spirit. 
He said, "Where are we going now?" 

 "Westward." 

 "Where did you go with Hare?" 

 "Into the darkness. I never lost him, but he was lost. He wandered on the 
outer borders, in the endless barrens of delirium and nightmare. His soul piped 
like a bird in those dreary places, like a seagull crying far from the sea. He is 
no guide. He has always been lost. For all his craft in sorcery he has never seen 
the way before him, seeing only himself." 

 Arren did not understand all of this; nor did he want to understand it, now. 
He had been drawn a little way into that "darkness" of which wizards spoke, and 
he did not want to remember it; it was nothing to do with him. Indeed he did not 
want to sleep, lest he see it again in dream and see that dark figure, a shadow 
holding out a pearl, whispering, "Come." 

 "My lord," he said, his mind veering away rapidly to another subject, "why-" 

 "Sleep!" said Sparrowhawk with mild exasperation. "I can't sleep, my lord. 
I wondered why you didn't free the other slaves." 

 "I did. I left none bound on that ship." 

 "But Egre's men had weapons. If you had bound them-" 

 "Aye, if I had bound them? There were but six. The oarsmen were chained slaves, 
like you. Egre and his men may be dead by now, or chained by the others to be sold 


as slaves; but I left them free to fight or bargain. I am no slavetaker." 

 "But you knew them to be evil men-" 

 "Was I to join them therefore? To let their acts rule my own? I will not make 
their choices for them, nor will I let them make mine for me!" 

 Arren was silent, pondering this. Presently the mage said, speaking softly, 
"Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one 
picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that 
rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is 
thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe 
is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends. The winds and seas, the 
powers of water and earth and light, all that these do, and all that the beasts 
and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the 
Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale's sounding to the fall of a 
dry leaf and the gnat's flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole. 
But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn 
to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn 
to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having 
choice, we must not act without responsibility. Who am I -though I have the power 
to do it- to punish and reward, playing with men's destinies?" 

 "But then," the boy said, frowning at the stars, "is the balance to be kept 
by doing nothing? Surely a man must act, even not knowing all the consequences of 
his act, if anything is to be done at all?" 

 "Never fear. It is much easier for men to act than to refrain from acting. 
We will continue to do good and to do evil... But if there were a king over us all 
again and he sought counsel of a mage, as in the days of old, and I were that mage, 
I would say to him: My lord, do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy 
or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which 
you must do and which you cannot do in any other way." 

 There was that in his voice which made Arren turn to watch him as he spoke. 
He thought that the radiance of light was shining again from his face, seeing the 
hawk nose and the scarred cheek, the dark, fierce eyes. And Arren looked at him 
with love, but also with fear, thinking, "He is too far above me." Yet as he gazed 
he became aware at last that it was no magelight, no cold glory of wizardry, that 
lay shadowless on every line and plane of the man's face, but light itself: morning, 
the common light of day. There was a power greater than the mage's. And the years 
had been no kinder to Sparrowhawk than to any man. Those were lines of age, and 
he looked tired, as the light grew ever stronger. He yawned... 

 So gazing and wondering and pondering, Arren fell asleep at last. But 
Sparrowhawk sat by him watching the dawn come and the sun rise, even as one might 
study a treasure for something gone amiss in it, a jewel flawed, a child sick. 

 

 

 

------ 

Sea Dreams 

------ 

 

 Late in the morning Sparrowhawk took the magewind from the sail and let his 
boat go by the world's wind, which blew softly to the south and west. Far off to 
the right, the hills of southern Wathort slipped away and fell behind, growing blue 
and small, like misty waves above the waves. 

 Arren woke. The sea basked in the hot, gold noon, endless water under endless 
light. In the stern of the boat Sparrowhawk sat naked except for a loincloth and 
a kind of turban made from sailcloth. He was singing softly, striking his palms 
on the thwart as if it were a drum, in a light, monotonous rhythm. The song he sang 
was no spell of wizardry, no chant or Deed of heroes or kings, but a lilting drone 
of non-sense words, such as a boy might sing as he herded goats through the long, 


long afternoons of summer, in the high hills of Gont, alone. 

 From the sea's surface a fish leapt up and glided through the air for many 
yards on stiff, shimmering vanes like the wings of dragonflies. 

 "We're in the South Reach," Sparrowhawk said when his song was done. "A 
strange part of the world, where the fish fly and the dolphins sing, they say. But 
the water's mild for swimming, and I have an understanding with the sharks. Wash 
the touch of the slave-taker from you." 

 Arren was sore in every muscle and loath to move at first. Also he was an 
unpracticed swimmer, for the seas of Enlad are bitter, so that one must fight with 
them rather than swim in them and is soon exhausted. This bluer sea was cold at 
first plunge, then delightful. Aches dropped away from him. He thrashed by Lookfar's 
side like a young sea-serpent. Spray flew up in fountains. Sparrowhawk joined him, 
swimming with a firmer stroke. Docile and protective, Lookfar waited for them, 
white-winged on the shining water. A fish leapt from sea to air; Arren pursued it; 
it dived, leapt up again, swimming in air, flying in the sea, pursuing him. 

 Golden and supple, the boy played and basked in the water and the light until 
the sun touched the sea. And dark and spare, with. the economy of gesture and the 
terse strength of age, the man swam, and kept the boat on course, and rigged up 
an awning of sailcloth, and watched the swimming boy and the flying fish with an 
impartial tenderness. 

 "Where are we heading?" Arren asked in the late dusk, after eating largely 
of salt meat and hard bread, and already sleepy again. 

 "Lorbanery," Sparrowhawk replied, and the soft syllables formed the last word 
Arren heard that night, so that his dreams of the early night wove themselves about 
it. He dreamt he was walking in drifts of soft, pale-colored stuff, shreds and 
threads of pink and gold and azure, and felt a foolish pleasure; someone told him, 
"These are the silk-fields of Lorbanery, where it never gets dark." But later, in 
the fag-end of night, when the stars of autumn shone in the sky of spring, he dreamt 
that he was in a ruined house. It was dry there. Everything was dusty, and festooned 
with ragged, dusty webs. Arren's legs were tangled in the webs, and they drifted 
across his mouth and nostrils, stopping his breath. And the worst horror of it was 
that he knew the high, ruined room was that hall where he had breakfasted with the 
Masters, in the Great House on Roke. 

 He woke all in dismay, his heart pounding, his legs cramped against a thwart. 
He sat up, trying to get away from the evil dream. In the east there was not yet 
light, but a dilution of darkness. The mast creaked; the sail, still taut to the 
northeast breeze, glimmered high and faint above him. In the stern his companion 
slept sound and silent. Arren lay down again and dozed till clear day woke him. 

 This day the sea was bluer and quieter than he had ever imagined it could 
be, the water so mild and clear that swimming in it was half like gliding or floating 
upon air; strange it was and dreamlike. 

 In the noontime he asked, "Do wizards make much account of dreams?" 

 Sparrowhawk was fishing. He watched his line attentively. After a long time 
he said, "Why?" 

 "I wondered if there's ever truth in them." 

 "Surely." 

 "Do they foretell truly?" 

 But the mage had a bite, and ten minutes later, when he had landed their lunch, 
a splendid silverblue sea bass, the question was clean forgotten. 

 In the afternoon as they lazed under the awning rigged to give shelter from 
the imperious sun, Arren asked, "What do we seek in Lorbanery?" 

 "That which we seek," said Sparrowhawk. 

 "In Enlad," said Arren after a while, "we have a story about the boy whose 
schoolmaster was a stone:' 

 "Aye?... What did he learn?" 

 "Not to ask questions." 

 Sparrowhawk snorted, as if suppressing a laugh, and sat up. "Very well!" he 


said. "Though I prefer to save talking till I know what I'm talking about. Why is 
there no more magic done in Hort Town and in Narveduen and maybe throughout all 
the Reaches? That's what we seek to learn, is it not?" 

 "Yes." 

 "Do you know the old saying, Rules change in the Reaches? Seamen use it, but 
it is a wizards' saying, and it means that wizardry itself depends on place. A true 
spell on Roke may be mere words on Iffish. The language of the Making is not 
everywhere remembered; here one word, there another. And the weaving of spells is 
itself interwoven with the earth and the water, the winds and the fall of light 
of the place where it is cast. I once sailed far into the East, so far that neither 
wind nor water heeded my command, being ignorant of their true names; or more likely 
it was I who was ignorant. 

 "The world is very large, the Open Sea going on past all knowledge; and there 
are worlds beyond the world. Over these abysses of space and in the long extent 
of time, I doubt whether any word that can be spoken would bear, everywhere and 
forever, its weight of meaning and its power; unless it were that First Word which 
Segoy spoke, making all, or the Final Word, which has not been nor will be spoken 
until all things are unmade... So, even within this world of our Earthsea, the little 
islands that we know, there are differences and mysteries and changes. And the place 
least known and fullest of mysteries is the South Reach. Few wizards of the Inner 
Lands have come among these people. They do not welcome wizards, having -so it is 
believed- their own kinds of magic. But the rumors of these are vague, and it may 
be that the art magic was never well known there, nor fully understood. If so, it 
would be easily undone by one who set himself to the undoing of it, and sooner 
weakened than our wizardry of the Inner Lands. And then we might hear tales of the 
failure of magic in the South. 

 "For discipline is the channel in which our acts run strong and deep; where 
there is no direction, the deeds of men run shallow and wander and are wasted. So 
that fat woman of the mirrors has lost her art and thinks she never had it. And 
so Hare takes his hazia and thinks he has gone farther than the greatest mages go, 
when he has barely entered the fields of dream and is already lost... But where 
is it that he thinks he goes? What is it he looks for? What is it that has swallowed 
up his wizardry? We have had enough of Hort Town, I think, so we go farther south, 
to Lorbanery, to see what the wizards do there, to find out what it is that we must 
find out... Does that answer you?" 

 "Yes, but-" 

 "Then let the stone be still a while!" said the mage. And he sat by the mast 
in the yellowish, glowing shade of the awning and looked out to sea, to the west, 
as the boat sailed softly southward through the afternoon. He sat erect and still. 
The hours passed. Arren swam a couple of times, slipping quietly into the water 
from the stern of the boat, for he did not like to cross the line of that dark gaze 
which, looking west over the sea, seemed to see far beyond the bright horizon-line, 
beyond the blue of air, beyond the boundaries of light. 

 Sparrowhawk came back from his silence at last and spoke, though not more 
than a word at a time. Arren's upbringing had made him quick to sense mood disguised 
by courtesy or by reserve; he knew his companion's heart was heavy. He asked no 
more questions and in the evening he said, "If I sing, will it disturb your 
thoughts?" Sparrowhawk replied with an effort at joking, "That depends upon the 
singing." 

 Arren sat with his back against the mast and sang. His voice was no longer 
high and sweet as when the music master of the Hall of Berila had trained it years 
ago, striking the harmonies on his tall harp; nowadays the higher tones of it were 
husky, and the deep tones had the resonance of a viol, dark and clear. He sang the 
Lament for the White Enchanter, that song which Elfarran made when she knew of 
Morred's death and waited for her own. Not often is that song sung, nor lightly. 
Sparrowhawk listened to the young voice, strong, sure, and sad between the red sky 
and the sea, and the tears came into his eyes, blinding. 


 Arren was silent for a while after that song; then he began to sing lesser, 
lighter tunes, softly, beguiling the great monotony of windless air and heaving 
sea and failing light, as night came on. 

 When he ceased to sing everything was still, the wind down, the waves small, 
wood and rope barely creaking. The sea lay hushed, and over it the stars came out 
one by one. Piercing bright to the south a yellow light appeared and sent a shower 
and splintering of gold across the water. 

 "Look! A beacon!" Then after a minute, "Can it be a star?" 

 Sparrowhawk gazed at it a while and finally said, "I think it must be the 
star Gobardon. It can be seen only in the South Reach. Gobardon means Crown. 
Kurremkarmerruk taught us that, sailing still farther south would bring, one by 
one, eight more stars clear of the horizon under Gobardon, making a great 
constellation, some say of a running man, others say of the Rune Agnen. The Rune 
of Ending." 

 They watched it clear the restless sea-horizon and shine forth steadily. 

 "You sang Elfarran's song," Sparrowhawk said, "as if you knew her grief, and 
you'd made me know it too... Of all the histories of Earthsea, that one has always 
held me most. The great courage of Morred against despair; and Serriadh who was 
born beyond despair, the gentle king. And her, Elfarran. When I did the greatest 
evil I have ever done, it was to her beauty that I thought I turned; and I saw her 
for a 

moment I saw Elfarran." 

 A cold thrill went up Arren's back. He swallowed and sat silent, looking at 
the splendid, baleful, topaz-yellow star. 

 "Which of the heroes is yours?" the mage asked, and Arren answered with a 
little hesitancy, "Erreth-Akbe." 

 "Because he was the greatest?" 

 "Because he might have ruled all Earthsea, but chose not to, and went on alone 
and died alone, fighting the dragon Orm on the shore of Selidor." 

 They sat a while, each following his own thoughts, and then Arren asked, still 
watching yellow Gobardon, "Is it true, then, that the dead can be brought back into 
life and made to speak to living souls, by magery?" 

 "By the spells of Summoning. It is in our power. But it is seldom done, and 
I doubt that it is ever wisely done. In this the Master Summoner agrees with me; 
he does not use or teach the Lore of Paln, in which such spells are contained. The 
greatest of them were made by one called the Grey Mage of Paln, a thousand years 
ago. He summoned up the spirits of the heroes and mages, even Erreth-Akbe, to give 
counsel to the Lords of Paln in their wars and government. But the counsel of the 
dead is not profitable to the living. Paln came on evil times, and the Grey Mage 
was driven forth; he died nameless." 

 "Is it a wicked thing, then?" 

 "I should call it a misunderstanding, rather. A misunderstanding of life. 
Death and life are the same thing - like the two sides of my hand, the palm and 
the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same... They can be neither 
separated, nor mixed." 

 "Then no one uses those spells now?" 

 "I have known only one man who used them freely, not reckoning their risk. 
For they are risky, dangerous, beyond any other magery. Death and life are like 
the two sides of my hand, I said, but the truth is we do not know what life is or 
what death is. To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is 
the end of it likely to be good." 

 "Who was the man who used them?" Arren asked. He had not found Sparrowhawk 
so willing to answer questions before, in this quiet, thoughtful mood; both of them 
were consoled by their talk, dark though the subject of it was. 

 "He lived in Havnor. They accounted him a mere sorcerer, but in native power 
he was a great mage. He made money from his art, showing any who paid him whatever 
spirit they asked to see, dead wife or husband or child, filling his house with 


unquiet shadows of old centuries, the fair women of the days of the Kings. I saw 
him summon from the Dry Land my own old master who was Archmage in my youth, Nemmerle, 
for a mere trick to entertain the idle. And that great soul came at his call, like 
a dog to heel. I was angry and challenged him -I was not Archmage then- saying, 
'You compel the dead to come into your house: will you come with me to theirs?' 
And I made him go with me into the Dry Land, though he fought me with all his will 
and changed his shape and wept aloud when nothing else would do." 

 "So you killed him?" Arren whispered, enthralled. 

 "No! I made him follow me into the land of the dead, and return with me from 
it. He was afraid. He who summoned the dead to him so easily was more afraid of 
death -of his own death- than any man I ever knew. At the wall of stones... But 
I tell you more than a novice ought to know. And you're not even a novice." Through 
the dusk the keen eyes returned Arren's gaze for a moment, abashing him. "No matter," 
said the Archmage. "There is a wall of stones, then, at a certain place on the bourne. 
Across it the spirit goes at death, and across it a living man may go and return 
again, if he is a mage.... By the wall of stones this man crouched down, on the 
side of the living, and tried to withstand my will, and could not. He clung to the 
stones with his hands and cursed and screamed. I have never seen a fear like that; 
it sickened me with its own sickness. I should have known by that that I did 
wrong. I was possessed 

by anger and by vanity. For he was very strong, and I was eager to prove that I 
was stronger." 

 "What did he do afterward-when you came back?" 

 "Grovelled, and swore never to use the Pelnish Lore again; kissed my hand 
and would have killed me if he dared. He went from Havnor into the West, to Paln 
perhaps; I heard years later that he had died. He was white-haired when I knew him, 
though long-armed and quick like a wrestler. What made me fall to talking of him? 
I cannot even bring to mind his name." 

 "His true name?" 

 "No! that I can remember-" Then he paused, and for the space of three 
heartbeats was utterly still. 

 "They called him Cob in Havnor," he said in a changed, careful voice. It had 
grown too dark for expression to be seen. Arren saw him turn and look at the yellow 
star, now higher above the waves and casting across them a broken trail of gold 
as slender as a spider's thread. After a long silence he said, "It's not only in 
dreams, you see, that we find ourselves facing what is yet to be in what was long 
forgotten, and speaking what seems nonsense because we will not see its meaning." 

 

 

 

------ 

Lorbanery 

------ 

 

 Seen across ten miles of sunlit water, Lorbanery was green, green as the 
bright moss by a fountain's rim. Nearby, it broke up into leaves, and tree-trunks, 
and shadows, and roads, and houses, and the faces and clothing of people, and dust, 
and all that goes to make up an island inhabited by men. Yet still, over all; it 
was green: for every acre of it that was not built or walked upon was given up to 
the low, round-topped hurbah trees, on the leaves of which feed the little worms 
that spin the silk that is made into thread and woven by the men and women and 
children of Lorbanery. At dusk the air there is full of small grey bats who feed 
on the little worms. They eat many, but are suffered to do so and are not killed 
by the silk-weavers, who indeed account it a deed of very evil omen to kill the 
grey-winged bats. For if human beings live off the worms, they say, surely small 
bats have the right to do so. 

 The houses were curious, with little windows set randomly, and thatches of 


hurbah-twigs, all green with moss and lichens. It had been a wealthy isle, as isles 
of the Reach go, and this was still to be seen in the well-painted and well-furnished 
houses, in the great spinning wheels and looms in the cottages and worksheds, and 
in the stone piers of the little harbor of Sosara, where several trading galleys 
might have docked. But there were no galleys in the harbor. The paint on the houses 
was faded, there was no new furniture, and most of the wheels and looms were still, 
with dust on them, and spiderwebs between pedal and pedal, between warp and frame. 

 "Sorcerers?" said the mayor of Sosara village, a short man with a face as 
hard and brown as the soles of his bare feet. "There's no sorcerers in Lorbanery. 
Nor ever was." 

 "Who'd have thought it?" said Sparrowhawk admiringly. He was sitting with 
eight or nine of the villagers, drinking hurbah-berry wine, a thin and bitter 
vintage. He had of necessity told them that he was in the South Reach hunting 
emmelstone, but he had in no way disguised himself or his companion, except that 
Arren had left his sword hidden in the boat, as usual, and if Sparrowhawk had his 
staff about him it was not to be seen. The villagers had been sullen and hostile 
at first and were disposed to turn sullen and hostile again at any moment; only 
Sparrowhawk's adroitness and authority had forced a grudging acceptance from them. 
"Wonderful men with trees you must have here," he said now. "What do they do about 
a late frost on the orchards?" 

 "Nothing," said a skinny man at the end of the row of villagers. They all 
sat in a line with their backs against the inn wall, under the eaves of the thatch. 
Just past their bare feet the large, soft rain of April pattered on the earth. 

 "Rain's the peril, not frost," the mayor said. "Rots the worm cases. No man's 
going to stop rain falling. Nor ever did." He was belligerent about sorcerers and 
sorcery; some of the others seemed more wistful on the subject. "Never did used 
to rain this time of year," one of them said, "when the old fellow was alive." 

 "Who? Old Mildi? Well, he's not alive. He's dead," said the mayor. 

 "Used to call him the Orcharder," the skinny man said. "Aye. Called him the 
Orcharder," said another one. Silence descended, like the rain. 

 Inside the window of the one-roomed inn Arren sat. He had found an old lute 
hung on the wall, a long-necked, three-stringed lute such as they play in the Isle 
of Silk, and he was playing with it now, learning to draw its music from it, not 
much louder than the patter of the rain on the thatch. 

 "In the markets in Hort Town," said Sparrowhawk "I saw stuff sold as silk 
of Lorbanery. Some of it was silk. But none of it was silk of Lorbanery." 

 "The seasons have been poor," said the skinny man. "Four years, five years 
now." 

 "Five years it is since Fallows Eve," said an old man in a munching, 
self-satisfied voice, "since old Mildi died, aye, die he did, and not near the age 
I am. Died on Fallows Eve he did." 

 "Scarcity puts up the prices," said the mayor. "For one bolt of semi-fine 
blue-dyed we get now what we used to get for three bolts." 

 "If we get it. Where's the ships? And the blue's false," said the skinny man, 
thus bringing on a half-hour argument concerning the quality of the dyes they used 
in the great worksheds. 

 "Who makes the dyes?" Sparrowhawk asked, and a new hassle broke out. The 
upshot of it was that the whole process of dyeing had been overseen by a family 
who, in fact, called themselves wizards; but if they ever had been wizards they 
had lost their art, and nobody else had found it, as the skinny man remarked sourly. 
For they all agreed, except the mayor, that the famous blue dyes of Lorbanery and 
the unmatchable crimson, the "dragon's fire" worn by queens in Havnor long ago, 
were not what they had been. Something had gone out of them. The unseasonable rains 
were at fault, or the dye-earths, or the refiners. "Or the eyes," said the skinny 
man, "of men who couldn't tell the true azure from blue mud," and he glared at the 
mayor. The mayor did not take up the challenge; they fell silent again. 

 The thin wine seemed only to acidify their tempers, and their faces looked 


glum. There was no sound now but the rustle of rain on the uncountable leaves of 
the orchards of the valley, and the whisper of the sea down at the end of the street, 
and the murmur of the lute in the darkness within doors. 

 "Can he sing, that girlish lad of yours?" asked the mayor. 

 "Aye, he can sing. Arren! Sing a measure for us, lad." 

 "I cannot get this lute to play out of the minor," said Arren at the window, 
smiling. "It wants to weep. What would you hear, my hosts?" 

 "Something new," growled the mayor. 

 The lute thrilled a little; he had the touch of it already. "This might be 
new here," he said. Then he sang. 

 

 By the white straits of Solea 

 and the bowed red branches 

 that bent their blossoms over 

 her bowed head, heavy 

 with sorrow for the lost lover, 

 by the red branch and the white branch 

 and the sorrow unceasing 

 do I swear, Serriadh, 

 son of my mother and of Morred, 

 to remember the wrong done 

 forever,forever. 

 

 They were still: the bitter faces and the shrewd, the hardworked hands and 
bodies. They sat still in the warm rainy Southern dusk, and heard that song like 
the cry of the grey swan of the cold seas of Ea, yearning, bereft. For a while after 
the song was over they kept still. 

 "That's a queer music," said one, uncertainly. 

 Another, reassured as to the absolute centrality of the isle of Lorbanery 
in all time and space, said, "Foreign music's always queer and gloomy." 

 "Give us some of yours," said Sparrowhawk. "I'd like to hear a cheery stave 
myself. The lad will always sing of old dead heroes." 

 "I'll do that," said the last speaker, and hemmed a bit, and started out to 
sing about a lusty, trusty barrel of wine, and a hey, ho, and about we go! But nobody 
joined him in the chorus, and he went flat on the hey, ho. 

 "There's no more proper singing," he said angrily. "It's the young people's 
fault, always chopping and changing the way things are done, and not learning the 
old songs." 

 "It's not that," said the skinny man, "there's no more proper anything. 
Nothing goes right anymore." 

 "Aye, aye, aye," wheezed the oldest one, "the luck's run out. That's what. 
The luck's run out." 

 After that there was not much to say. The villagers departed by twos and threes, 
until Sparrowhawk was left alone outside the window and Arren inside it. And then 
Sparrowhawk laughed, at last. But it was not a merry laugh. 

 The innkeeper's shy wife came and spread out beds for them on the floor and 
went away, and they lay down to sleep. But the high rafters of the room were an 
abode of bats. In and out the unglazed window the bats flew all night long, 
chittering very high. Only at dawn did they all return and settle, each composing 
itself in a little, neat, grey package hanging from a rafter upside down. 

 Perhaps it was the restlessness of the bats that made Arren's sleep uneasy. 
It was many nights now since he had slept ashore; his body was not used to the 
immobility of earth and insisted to him as he fell asleep that he was rocking, 
rocking... and then the world would fall out from underneath him and he would wake 
with a great start. When at last he got to sleep, he dreamt he was chained in the 
hold of the slaver's ship; there were others chained with him, but they were all 
dead. He woke from this dream more than once, struggling to get free of it, but 


falling to sleep at once reentered it. At last it seemed to him that he was all 
alone on the ship, but still chained so that he could not move. Then a curious, 
slow voice spoke in his ear. "Loose your bonds," it said. "Loose your bonds." He 
tried to move then, and moved: he stood up. He was on some vast, dim moor, under 
a heavy sky. There was horror in the earth and in the thick air, an enormity of 
horror. This place was fear, was fear itself; and he was in it, and there were no 
paths. He must find the way, but there were no paths, and he was tiny, like a child, 
like an ant, and the place was huge, endless. He tried to walk, stumbled, woke. 

 The fear was inside him, now that he was awake, and he was not inside it: 
yet it was no less huge and endless. He felt choked by the black darkness of the 
room, and looked for stars in the dim square that was the window, but though the 
rain had ceased there were no stars. He lay awake and was afraid, and the bats flew 
in and out on noiseless leather wings. Sometimes he heard their thin voices at the 
very limit of his hearing. 

 The morning came bright, and they were early up. Sparrowhawk inquired 
earnestly for emmelstone. Though none of the townsfolk knew what emmelstone was, 
they all had theories about it and quarreled over them; and he listened, though 
he listened for news of something other than emmelstone. At last he and Arren took 
a way that the mayor suggested to them, toward the quarries where the blue dye-earth 
was dug. But on the way Sparrowhawk turned aside. 

 "This will be the house," he said. "They said that that family of dyers and 
discredited magicians lives on this road." 

 "Is it any use to talk to them?" said Arren, remembering Hare all too well. 

 "There is a center to this bad luck," said the mage, harshly. "There is a 
place where the luck runs out. I need a guide to that place!" And he went on, and 
Arren must follow. 

 The house stood apart among its own orchards, a fine building of stone, but 
it and all its acreage had gone long uncared for. Cocoons of ungathered silkworms 
hung discolored among the ragged branches, and the ground beneath was thick with 
a papery litter of dead grubs and moths. All about the house under the close-set 
trees there hung an odor of decay, and as they came to it Arren suddenly remembered 
the horror that had been on him in the night. 

 Before they reached the door it was flung open. Out charged a grey-haired 
woman, glaring with reddened eyes and shouting, "Out, curse you, thieves, 
slanderers, lackwits, liars, and misbegotten fools! Get out, out, go! The ill chance 
be on you forever!" 

 Sparrowhawk stopped, looking somewhat amazed, and quickly raised his hand 
in a curious gesture. He said one word, "Avert!" 

 At that the woman stopped yelling. She stared at him. 

 "Why did you do that?" 

 "To turn your curse aside." 

 She stared a while longer and said at last, hoarsely, "Foreigners?" 

 "From the North." 

 She came forward. At first Arren had been inclined to laugh at her, an old 
woman screeching on her doorstep, but close to her he felt only shame. She was foul 
and ill-clothed, and her breath stank, and her eyes had a terrible stare of pain. 

 "I have no power to curse," she said. "No power." She imitated Sparrowhawk's 
gesture. "They still do that, where you come from?" 

 He nodded. He watched her steadily, and she returned his gaze. Presently her 
face began to work and change, and she said, "Where's the stick?" 

 "I do not show it here, sister." 

 "No, you should not. It will keep you from life. Like my power: it kept me 
from life. So I lost it. I lost all the things I knew, all the words and names. 
They came by little strings like spiderwebs out of my eyes and mouth. There is a 
hole in the world, and the light is running out of it. And the words go with the 
light. Did you know that? My son sits staring all day at the dark, looking for the 
hole in the world. He says he would see better if he were blind. He has lost his 


hand as a dyer. We were the Dyers of Lorbanery. Look!" She shook before them her 
muscular, thin arms, stained to the shoulder with a faint, streaky mixture of 
ineradicable dyes. "It never comes off the skin," she said, "but the mind washes 
clean. It won't hold the colors. Who are you?" 

 Sparrowhawk said nothing. Again his eyes held the woman's; and Arren, 
standing aside, watched uneasily. 

 All at once she trembled and said in a whisper, "I know thee-" 

 "Aye. Like knows like, sister." 

 It was strange to see how she pulled away from the mage in terror, wanting 
to flee him, and yearned toward him as if to kneel at his feet. 

 He took her hand and held her. "Would you have your power back, the skills, 
the names? I can give you that." 

 "You are the Great Man," she whispered. "You are the King of the Shadows, 
the Lord of the Dark Place-" 

 "I am not. I am no king. I am a man, a mortal, your brother and your like." 

 "But you will not die?" 

 "I will." 

 "But you will come back and live forever." 

 "Not I. Nor any man." 

 "Then you are not - not the Great One in the darkness," she said, frowning, 
and looking at him a little askance, with less fear. "But you are a Great One. Are 
there two? What is your name?" 

 Sparrowhawk's stern face softened a moment. "I cannot tell you that," he said 
gently. 

 "I'll tell you a secret," she said. She stood straighter now, facing him, 
and there was the echo of an old dignity in her voice and bearing. "I do not want 
to live and live and live forever. I would rather have back the names of things. 
But they are all gone. Names don't matter now. There are no more secrets. Do you 
want to know my name?" Her eyes filled with light, her fists clenched, she leaned 
forward and whispered: "My name is Akaren." Then she screamed aloud, "Akaren! Akaren! 
My name is Akaren! Now they all know my secret name, my true name, and there are 
no secrets, and there is no truth, and there is no death- death- death!" She screamed 
the word sobbing, and spittle flew from her lips. 

 "Be still, Akaren!" 

 She was still. Tears ran down her face, which was dirty, and streaked with 
locks of her uncombed, grey hair. 

 Sparrowhawk took that wrinkled, tear-blubbered face between his hands and 
very lightly, very tenderly, kissed her on the eyes. She stood motionless, her eyes 
closed. Then with his lips close to her ear he spoke a little in the Old Speech, 
once more kissed her, and let her go. 

 She opened clear eyes and looked at him a while with a brooding, wondering 
gaze. So a newborn child looks at its mother; so a mother looks at her child. She 
turned slowly and went to her door, entered it, and closed it behind her: all in 
silence, with the still look of wonder on her face. 

 In silence the mage turned and started back toward the road. Arren followed 
him. He dared ask no question. Presently the mage stopped, there in the ruined 
orchard, and said, "I took her name from her and gave her a new one. And thus in 
some sense a rebirth. There was no other help or hope for her." 

 His voice was strained and stifled. 

 "She was a woman of power," he went on. "No mere witch or potion-maker, but 
a woman of art and skill, using her craft for the making of the beautiful, a proud 
woman and honorable. That was her life. And it is all wasted." He turned abruptly 
away, walked off into the orchard aisles, and there stood beside a tree-trunk, his 
back turned. 

 Arren waited for him in the hot, leaf-speckled sunlight. He knew that 
Sparrowhawk was ashamed to burden Arren with his emotion; and indeed there was 
nothing the boy could do or say. But his heart went out utterly to his companion, 


not now with that first romantic ardor and adoration, but painfully, as if a link 
were drawn forth from the very inmost of it and forged into an unbreaking bond. 
For in this love he now felt there was compassion: without which love is untempered, 
and is not whole, and does not last. 

 Presently Sparrowhawk returned to him through the green shade of the orchard. 
Neither said anything, and they went on side by side. It was hot already; last 
night's rain had dried, and dust rose under their feet on the road. Earlier the 
day had seemed dreary and insipid to Arren, as if infected by his dreams; now he 
took pleasure in the bite of the sunlight and the relief of shade, and enjoyed 
walking without brooding about their destination. 

 This was just as well, for they accomplished nothing. The afternoon was spent 
in talking with the men who mined the dye-ores, and bargaining for some bits of 
what was said to be emmelstone. As they trudged back to Sosara with the late sun 
pounding on their heads and necks, Sparrowhawk remarked, "It's blue malachite; but 
I doubt they'll know the difference in Sosara either." 

 "They're strange here," Arren said. "It's that way with everything; they 
don't know the difference. Like what one of them said to the headman last night, 
'You wouldn't know the true azure from blue mud...' They complain about bad times, 
but they don't know when the bad times began; they say the work's shoddy, but they 
don't improve it; they don't even know the difference between an artisan and a 
spell-worker, between handicraft and the art magic. It's as if they had no lines 
and distinctions and colors clear in their heads. Everything's the same to them; 
everything's grey." 

 Aye," said the mage, thoughtfully. He stalked along for a while, his head 
hunched between his shoulders, hawklike; though a short man, he walked with a long 
stride. "What is it they're missing?" 

 Arren said without hesitation, "Joy in life." 

 "Aye," said Sparrowhawk again, accepting Arren's statement and pondering it 
for some time. "I'm glad," he said at last, "that you can think for me, lad... I 
feel tired and stupid. I've been sick at heart since this morning, since we talked 
to her who was Akaren. I do not like waste and destruction. I do not want an enemy. 
If I must have an enemy, I do not want to seek him, and find him, and meet him... 
If one must hunt, the prize should be a treasure, not a detestable thing." 

 "An enemy, my lord?" said Arren. 

 Sparrowhawk nodded. 

 "When she talked about the Great Man, the King of Shadows-?" 

 Sparrowhawk nodded again. "I think so," he said. "I think we must come not 
only to a place, but to a person. This is evil, evil, what passes on this island: 
this loss of craft and pride, this joylessness, this waste. This is the work of 
an evil will. But a will not even bent here, not even noticing Akaren or Lorbanery. 
The track we hunt is a track of wreckage, as if we followed a runaway cart down 
a mountainside and watched it set off an avalanche." 

 "Could she -Akaren- tell you more about this enemy- who he is and where he 
is, or what he is?" 

 "Not now, lad," the mage said in a soft but rather bleak voice. "No doubt 
she could have. In her madness there was still wizardry. Indeed her madness was 
her wizardry. But I could not hold her to answer me. She was in too much pain." 

 And he walked on with his head somewhat hunched between his shoulders, as 
if himself enduring, and longing to avoid, some pain. 

 Arren turned, hearing a scuffle of feet behind them on the road. A man was 
running after them, a good way off but catching up fast. The dust of the road and 
his long, wiry hair made aureoles of red about him in the westering light, and his 
long shadow hopped fantastically along the trunks and aisles of the orchards by 
the road. "Listen!" he shouted. "Stop! I found it! I found it!" 

 He caught up with them in a rush. Arren's hand went first to the air where 
his sword hilt might have been, then to the air where his lost knife had been, and 
then made itself into a fist, all in half a second. He scowled and moved forward. 


The man was a full head taller than Sparrowhawk, and broadshouldered: a panting, 
raving, wild-eyed madman. "I found it!" he kept saying, while Arren, trying to 
dominate him by a stern, threatening voice and attitude, said, "What do you want?" 
The man tried to get around him, to Sparrowhawk; Arren stepped in front of him again. 

 "You are the Dyer of Lorbanery," Sparrowhawk said. 

 Then Arren felt he had been a fool, trying to protect his companion; and he 
stepped aside, out of the way. For at six words from the mage, the madman stopped 
his panting and the clutching gesture of his big, stained hands; his eyes grew 
quieter; he nodded his head. 

 "I was the dyer," he said, "but now I can't dye." Then he looked askance at 
Sparrowhawk and grinned; he shook his head with its reddish, dusty bush of hair. 
"You took away my mother's name," he said. "Now I don't know her, and she doesn't 
know me. She loves me well enough still, but she's left me. She's dead." 

 Arren's heart contracted, but he saw that Sparrowhawk merely shook his head 
a little. "No, no," he said, "she's not dead." 

 "But she will be. She'll die." 

 "Aye. That's a consequence of being alive," the mage said. The Dyer seemed 
to puzzle this over for a minute, and then came right up to Sparrowhawk, seized 
his shoulders, and bent over him. He moved so fast that Arren could not prevent 
him, but Arren did come up very close, and so heard his whisper, "I found the hole 
in the darkness. The King was standing there. He watches it; he rules it. He had 
a little flame, a little candle in his hand. He blew on it and it went out. Then 
he blew on it again and it burned! It burned!" 

 Sparrowhawk made no protest at being held and whispered at. He simply asked, 
"Where were you when you saw that?" 

 "In bed." 

 "Dreaming?" 

 "No." 

 "Across the wall?" 

 "No," the Dyer said, in a suddenly sober tone, and as if uncomfortable. He 
let the mage go, and took a step back from him. "No, I- I don't know where it is. 
I found it. But I don't know where." 

 "That's what I'd like to know," said Sparrowhawk. 

 "I can help you." 

 "How?" 

 "You have a boat. You came here in it and you're going on. Are you going on 
west? That's the way. The way to the place where he comes out. There has to be a 
place, a place here, because he's alive- not just the spirits, the ghosts, that 
come over the wall, not like that, -you can't bring anything but souls over the 
wall, but this is the body; this is the flesh immortal. I saw the flame rise in 
the darkness at his breath, the flame that was out. I saw that." The man's face 
was transfigured, a wild beauty in it in the long, red-gold light. "I know that 
he has overcome death. I know it. I gave my wizardry to know it. I was a wizard 
once! And you know it, and you are going there. Take me with you." 

 The same light shone on Sparrowhawk's face, but left it unmoved and harsh. 
"I am trying to go there," he said. 

 "Let me go with you!" 

 Sparrowhawk nodded briefly. "If you're ready when we sail," he said, as coldly 
as before. 

 The Dyer backed away from him another step and stood watching him, the 
exaltation in his face clouding slowly over until it was replaced by a strange, 
heavy look; it was as if reasoning thought were laboring to break through the storm 
of words and feelings and visions that confused him. Finally he turned around 
without a word and began to run back down the road, into the haze of dust that had 
not yet settled on his tracks. Arren drew a long breath of relief. 

 Sparrowhawk also sighed, though not as if his heart were any easier. "Well," 
he said. "Strange roads have strange guides. Let's go on." 


 Arren fell into step beside him. "You won't take him with us?" he asked. 

 "That's up to him." 

 With a flash of anger Arren thought: It's up to me, also. But he did not say 
anything, and they went on together in silence. 

 They were not well-received on their return to Sosara. Everything on a little 
island like Lorbanery is known as soon as it is done, and no doubt they had been 
seen turning aside to the Dyers' House and talking to the madman on the road. The 
innkeeper served them uncivilly, and his wife acted scared to death of them. In 
the evening when the men of the village came to sit under the eaves of the inn, 
they made much display of not speaking to the foreigners and being very witty and 
merry among themselves. But they had not much wit to pass around and soon ran short 
of jollity. They all sat in silence for a long time, and at last the mayor said 
to Sparrowhawk, "Did you find your blue rocks?" 

 "I found some blue rocks," Sparrowhawk replied politely. 

 "Sopli showed you where to find 'em, no doubt." 

 Ha, ha ha, went the other men, at this masterstroke of irony. 

 "Sopli would be the red-haired man?" 

 "The madman. You called on his mother in the morning." 

 "I was looking for a wizard," said the wizard. 

 The skinny man, who sat nearest him, spat into the darkness. "What for?" 

 "I thought I might find out about what I'm looking for." 

 "People come to Lorbanery for silk," the mayor said. "They don't come for 
stones. They don't come for charms. Or arm-wavings and jibber-jabber and sorcerers' 
tricks. Honest folk live here and do honest work." 

 "That's right. He's right," said others. 

 "And we don't want any other sort here, people from foreign parts snooping 
about and prying into our business." 

 "That's right. He's right," came the chorus. 

 "If there was any sorcerer around that wasn't crazy, we'd give him an honest 
job in the sheds, but they don't know how to do honest work." 

 "They might, if there were any to do," said Sparrowhawk. "Your sheds are empty, 
the orchards are untended, the silk in your warehouses was all woven years ago. 
What do you do, here in Lorbanery?" 

 "We look after our own business," the mayor snapped, but the skinny man broke 
in excitedly, "Why don't the ships come, tell us that! What are they doing in Hort 
Town? Is it because our work's been shoddy?-" He was interrupted by angry denials. 
They shouted at one another, jumped to their feet, the mayor shook his fist in 
Sparrowhawk's face, another drew a knife. Their mood had gone wild. Arren was on 
his feet at once. He looked at Sparrowhawk, expecting to see him stand up in the 
sudden radiance of the magelight and strike them dumb with his revealed power. But 
he did not. He sat there and looked from one to another and listened to their menaces. 
And gradually they fell quiet, as if they could not keep up anger any more than 
they could keep up merriment. The knife was sheathed; the threats turned to sneers. 
They began to go off like dogs leaving a dog-fight, some strutting and some sneaking. 

 When the two were left alone Sparrowhawk got up, went inside the inn, and 
took a long draft of water from the jug beside the door. "Come, lad," he said. "I've 
had enough of this." 

 "To the boat?" 

 "Aye." He put down two trade-counters of silver on the windowsill to pay for 
their lodging, and hoisted up their light pack of clothing. Arren was tired and 
sleepy, but he looked around the room of the inn, stuffy and bleak, and all a-flitter 
up in the rafters with the restless bats; he thought of last night in that room 
and followed Sparrowhawk willingly. He thought, too, as they went down Sosara's 
one, dark street, that going now they would give the madman Sopli the slip. But 
when they came to the harbor he was waiting for them on the pier. 

 "There you are," said the mage. "Get aboard, if you want to come." 

 Without a word, Sopli got down into the boat and crouched beside the mast, 


like a big, unkempt dog. At this Arren rebelled "My lord!" he said. Sparrowhawk 
turned; they stood face to face on the pier above the boat. 

 "They are all mad on this island, but I thought you were not. Why do you take 
him?" 

 "As a guide." 

 "A guide -to more madness? To death by drowning, or a knife in the back?" 

 "To death, but by what road I do not know." 

 Arren spoke with heat, and though Sparrowhawk answered quietly, there was 
something of a fierce note in his voice. He was not used to being questioned. But 
ever since Arren had tried to protect him from the madman on the road that afternoon 
and had seen how vain and unneeded his protection was, he had felt a bitterness, 
and all that uprush of devotion he had felt in the morning was spoilt and wasted. 
He was unable to protect Sparrowhawk; he was not permitted to make any decisions; 
he was unable, or was not permitted, even to understand the nature of their quest. 
He was merely dragged along on it, useless as a child. But he was not a child. 

 "I would not quarrel with you, my lord," he said as coldly as he could. "But 
this- this is beyond reason!" 

 "It is beyond all reason. We go where reason will not take us. Will you come, 
or will you not?" 

 Tears of anger sprang into Arren's eyes. "I said I would come with you and 
serve you. I do not break my word." 

 "That is well," the mage said grimly and made as if to turn away. Then he 
faced Arren again. "I need you, Arren; and you need me. For I will tell you now 
that I believe this way we go is yours to follow, not out of obedience or loyalty 
to me, but because it was yours to follow before you ever saw me; before you ever 
set foot on Roke; before you sailed from Enlad. You cannot turn back from it." 

 His voice had not softened. Arren answered him as grimly, "How should I turn 
back, with no boat, here on the edge of the world?" 

 "This the edge of the world? No, that is farther on. We may yet come to it." 

 Arren nodded once and swung down into the boat. Sparrowhawk loosed the line 
and spoke a light wind into the sail. Once away from the looming, empty docks of 
Lorbanery the air blew cool and clean out of the dark north, and the moon broke 
silver from the sleek sea before them and rode upon their left as they turned 
southward to coast the isle. 

 

 

------ 

The Madman 

------ 

 

 The madman, the Dyer of Lorbanery, sat huddled up against the mast, his arms 
wrapped around his knees and his head hunched down. His mass of wiry hair looked 
black in the moonlight. Sparrowhawk had rolled himself up in a blanket and gone 
to sleep in the stern of the boat. Neither of them stirred. Arren sat up in the 
prow; he had sworn to himself to watch all night. If the mage chose to assume that 
their lunatic passenger would not assault him or Arren in the night, that was all 
very well for him; Arren, however, would make his own assumptions and undertake 
his own responsibilities. 

 But the night was very long and very calm. The moonlight poured down, 
changeless. Huddled by the mast, Sopli snored, long, soft snores. Softly the boat 
moved onward; softly Arren slid into sleep. He started awake once and saw the moon 
scarcely higher; he abandoned his selfrighteous guardianship, made himself 
comfortable, and went to sleep. 

 He dreamt again, as he seemed always to do on this voyage, and at first the 
dreams were fragmentary but strangely sweet and reassuring. In place of Lookfar's 
mast a tree grew, with great, arching arms of foliage; swans guided the boat, 
swooping on strong wings before it; far ahead, over the beryl green sea, shone a 


city of white towers. Then he was in one of those towers, climbing the steps which 
spiralled upward, running up them lightly and eagerly. These scenes changed and 
recurred and led into others, which passed without trace; but suddenly he was in 
the dreaded, dull twilight on the moors, and the horror grew in him until he could 
not breathe. 

 But he went forward, because he must go forward. After a long time he realized 
that to go forward here was to go in a circle and come round on one's own tracks 
again. Yet he must get out, get away. It grew more and more urgent. He began to 
run. As he ran, the circles narrowed in and the ground began to slant. He was running 
in the darkening gloom, faster and faster, around the sinking inner lip of a pit, 
an enormous whirlpool sucking down to darkness: and as he knew this, his foot slipped 
and he fell. 

 "What's the matter, Arren?" 

 Sparrowhawk spoke to him from the stern. Grey dawn held the sky and sea still. 

 "Nothing." 

 "The nightmare?" 

 "Nothing." 

 Arren was cold, and his right arm ached from having been cramped under him. 
He shut his eyes against the growing light and thought, "He hints of this and hints 
of that, but he will never tell me clearly where we're going, or why, or why I should 
go there. And now he drags this madman with us. Which is maddest, the lunatic or 
I, for coming with him? The two of them may understand each other; it's the wizards 
who are mad now, Sopli said. I could have been at home by now, at home in the Hall 
in Berila, in my room with the carven walls and the red rugs on the floor and a 
fire in the hearth, waking up to go out a-hawking with my father. Why did I come 
with him? Why did he bring me? Because it's my way to go, he says, but that's wizard's 
talk, making things seem great by great words. But the meaning of the words is always 
somewhere else. If I have any way to go, it's to my home, not wandering senselessly 
across the Reaches. I have duties at home and am shirking them. If he really thinks 
there is some enemy of wizardry at work, why did he come alone, with me? He might 
have brought another mage to help him- a hundred of them. He could have brought 
an army of warriors, a fleet of ships. Is this how a great peril is met, by sending 
out an old man and a boy in a boat? This is mere folly. He is mad himself; it is 
as he said, he seeks death. He seeks death, and wants to take me with him. But I 
am not mad and not old; I will not die; I will not go with him." 

 He sat up on his elbow, looking forward. The moon that had risen before them 
as they left Sosara Bay was again before them, sinking. Behind, in the east, day 
came wan and dull. There were no clouds, but a faint, sickly overcast. Later in 
the day the sun grew hot, but it shone veiled, without splendor. 

 All day long they coasted Lorbanery, low and green to their right hand. A 
light wind blew off the land and filled their sail. Toward evening they passed a 
long last cape; the breeze died down. Sparrowhawk spoke the magewind into the sail, 
and like a falcon loosed from the wrist, Lookfar started and fled forward eagerly, 
putting the Isle of Silk behind. 

 Sopli the Dyer had cowered in the same place all day, evidently afraid of 
the boat and afraid of the sea, seasick and wretched. He spoke now, hoarsely. "Are 
we going west?" 

 The sunset was right in his face; but Sparrowhawk, patient with his stupidest 
questions, nodded. 

 "To Obehol?" 

 "Obehol lies west of Lorbanery." 

 "A long way west. Maybe the place is there." 

 "What is it like, the place?" 

 "How do I know? How could I see it? It's not on Lorbanery! I hunted for it 
for years, four years, five years, in the dark, at night, shutting my eyes, always 
with him calling Come, come, but I couldn't come. I'm no lord of wizards who can 
tell the ways in the dark. But there's a place to come to in the light, under the 


sun too. That's what Mildi and my mother wouldn't understand. They kept looking 
in the dark. Then old Mildi died, and my mother lost her mind. She forgot the spells 
we use in the dyeing, and it affected her mind. She wanted to die, but I told her 
to wait. Wait till I find the place. There must be a place. If the dead can come 
back to life in the world, there must be a place in the world where it happens." 

 "Are the dead coming back to life?" 

 "I thought you knew such things," Sopli said after a pause, looking askance 
at Sparrowhawk. 

 "I seek to know them." 

 Sopli said nothing. The mage suddenly looked at him, a direct, compelling 
gaze, though his tone was gentle: "Are you looking for a way to live forever, Sopli?" 

 Sopli returned his gaze for a moment; then he hid his shaggy, brownish-red 
head in his arms, locking his hands across his ankles, and rocked himself a little 
back and forth. It seemed that when he was frightened he took this position; and 
when he was in it, he would not speak or take any notice of what was said. Arren 
turned away from him in despair and disgust. How could they go on, with Sopli, for 
days or weeks, in an eighteen-foot boat? It was like sharing a body with a diseased 
soul... 

 Sparrowhawk came up beside Arren in the prow and knelt with one knee on the 
thwart, looking into the sallow evening. He said, "The man has a gentle spirit." 

 Arren did not answer this. He asked coldly, "What is Obehol? I never heard 
the name." 

 "I know its name and place on the charts; no more... Look there: the companions 
of Gobardon!" 

 The great topaz-colored star was higher in the south now, and beneath it, 
just clearing the dim sea, shone a white star to the left and a bluish-white one 
to the right, forming a triangle. 

 "Have they names?" 

 "The Master Namer did not know. Maybe the men of Obehol and Wellogy have names 
for them. I do not know. We go now into strange seas, Arren, under the Sign of 
Ending." 

 The boy did not answer, looking with a kind of loathing at the bright, nameless 
stars above the endless water. 

 

 As they sailed westward day after day, the warmth of the southern spring lay 
on the waters, and the sky was clear. Yet it seemed to Arren that there was a dullness 
in the light, as if it fell aslant through glass. The sea was lukewarm when he swam, 
bringing little refreshment. Their salt food had no savor. There was no freshness 
or brightness in anything, unless it were at night, when the stars burned with a 
greater radiance than he had ever seen in them. He would lie and watch them till 
he slept. Sleeping, he would dream: always the dream of the moors or the pit or 
a valley hemmed round by cliffs or a long road going downward under a low sky; always 
the dim light, and the horror in him, and the hopeless effort to escape. 

 He never spoke of this to Sparrowhawk. He did not speak of anything important 
to him, nothing but the small daily incidents of their sailing; and Sparrowhawk, 
who had always had to be drawn out, was now habitually silent. 

 Arren saw now what a fool he had been to entrust himself body and soul to 
this restless and secretive man, who let impulse move him and made no effort to 
control his life, nor even to save it. For now the fey mood was on him; and that, 
Arren thought, was because he dared not face his own failure- the failure of wizardry 
as a great power among men. 

 It was clear now that to those who knew the secrets, there were not many 
secrets to that art magic from which Sparrowhawk and all the generations of 
sorcerers and wizards, had made much fame and power. There was not much more to 
it than the use of wind and weather, the knowledge of healing herbs, and a skillful 
show of such illusions as mists and lights and shape-changes, which could awe the 
ignorant, but which were mere tricks. Reality was not changed. There was nothing 


in magery that gave a man true power over men; nor was it any use against death. 
The mages lived no longer than ordinary men. All their secret words could not put 
off for one hour the coming of their death. 

 Even in small matters magery was not worth counting on. Sparrowhawk was always 
miserly about employing his arts; they went by the world's wind whenever they might, 
they fished for food, and they spared their water, like any sailors. After four 
days of interminable tacking into a fitful headwind, Arren asked him if he would 
not speak a little following wind into the sail, and when he shook his head, said, 
"Why not?" 

 "I would not ask a sick man to run a race," said Sparrowhawk, "nor lay a stone 
on an overburdened back." It was not clear whether he spoke of himself or of the 
world at large. Always his answers were grudging, hard to understand. There, thought 
Arren, lay the very heart of wizardry: to hint at mighty meanings while saying 
nothing at all, and to make doing nothing at all seem the very crown of wisdom. 

 Arren had tried to ignore Sopli, but it was impossible; and in any case he 
soon found himself in a kind of alliance with the madman. Sopli was not so mad, 
or not so simply mad, as his wild hair and fragmented talk made him appear. Indeed 
the maddest thing about him was perhaps his terror of the water. To come into a 
boat had taken desperate courage, and he never really got the edge worn off his 
fear; he kept his head down so much so that he would not have to see the water heaving 
and lapping about him. To stand up in the boat made him giddy; he clung to the mast. 
The first time Arren decided on a swim and dived off the prow, Sopli shouted out 
in horror; when Arren came climbing back into the boat, the poor man was green with 
shock. "I thought you were drowning yourself," he said, and Arren had to laugh. 

 That afternoon, when Sparrowhawk sat meditating, unheeding and unhearing, 
Sopli came hitching cautiously over the thwarts to Arren. He said in a low voice, 
"You don't want to die, do you?" 

 "Of course not." 

 "He does," Sopli said, with a little shift of his lower jaw toward 
Sparrowhawk. 

 "Why do you say that?" 

 Arren took a lordly tone, which indeed came naturally to him, and Sopli 
accepted it as natural, though he was ten or fifteen years older than Arren. He 
replied with ready civility, though in his usual fragmentary way, "He wants to get 
to the secret place. But I don't know why. He doesn't want... He doesn't believe 
in... the promise." 

 "What promise?" 

 Sopli glanced up at him sharply, something of his ruined manhood in his eyes; 
but Arren's will was stronger. He answered very low, "You know. Life. Eternal life." 

 A great chill went through Arren's body. He remembered his dreams: the moor, 
the pit, the cliffs, the dim light. That was death; that was the horror of death. 
It was from death he must escape, must find the way. And on the doorsill stood the 
figure crowned with shadow, holding out a little light no larger than a pearl, the 
glimmer of immortal life. 

 Arren met Sopli's eyes for the first time: light brown eyes, very clear; in 
them he saw that he had understood at last, and that Sopli shared his knowledge. 

 "He," the Dyer said, with his twitch of the jaw toward Sparrowhawk "he won't 
give up his name. Nobody can take his name through. The way is too narrow." 

 "Have you seen it?" 

 "In the dark, in my mind. That's not enough. I want to get there; I want to 
see it. In the world, with my eyes. What if I- what if I died and couldn't find 
the way, the place? Most people can't find it; they don't even know it's there. 
There's only some of us have the power. But it's hard, because you have to give 
the power up to get there... No more words. No more names. It is too hard to do 
in the mind. And when you- die, your mind- dies." He stuck each time on the word. 
"I want to know I can come back. I want to be there. On the side of life. I want 
to live, to be safe. I hate- I hate this water..." 


 The Dyer drew his limbs together as a spider does when falling, and hunched 
his wiry-red head down between his shoulders, to shut out the sight of the sea. 

 But Arren did not shun his conversation after that, knowing that Sopli shared 
not only his vision, but his fear; and that, if worse came to worst, Sopli might 
aid him against Sparrowhawk. 

 Always they sailed, slowly in the calms and fitful breezes, to the west, where 
Sparrowhawk pretended that Sopli guided them. But Sopli did not guide them, he who 
knew nothing of the sea, had never seen a chart, never been in a boat, dreaded the 
water with a sick dread. It was the mage who guided them and led them deliberately 
astray. Arren saw this now and saw the reason of it. The Archmage knew that they 
and others like them were seeking eternal life, had been promised it or drawn toward 
it, and might find it. In his pride, his overweening pride as Archmage, he feared 
lest they might gain it; he envied them, and feared them, and would have no man 
greater than himself. He meant to sail out onto the Open Sea beyond all lands until 
they were utterly astray and could never come back to the world, and there they 
would die of thirst. For he would die himself, to prevent them from eternal life. 

 Every now and then there would come a moment when Sparrowhawk spoke to Arren 
of some small matter of managing the boat or swam with him in the warm sea or bade 
him good night under the great stars, when all these ideas seemed utter nonsense 
to the boy. He would look at his companion and see him, that hard, harsh, patient 
face, and he would think, "This is my lord and friend." And it seemed unbelievable 
to him that he had doubted. But a little while later he would be doubting again, 
and he and Sopli would exchange glances, warning each other of their mutual enemy. 

 Every day the sun shone hot, yet dull. Its light lay like a gloss on the 
slow-heaving sea. The water was blue, the sky blue without change or shading. The 
breezes blew and died, and they turned the sail to catch them and slowly crept on 
toward no end. 

 One afternoon they had at last a light following wind; and Sparrowhawk pointed 
upward, near sunset, saying, "Look." High above the mast a line of seageese wavered 
like a black rune drawn across the sky. The geese flew westward: and following, 
Lookfar came on the next day in sight of a great island. 

 "That's it," Sopli said. "That land. We must go there." 

 "The place you seek is there?" 

 "Yes. We must land there. This is as far as we can go. 

 "This land will be Obehol. Beyond it in the South Reach is another island, 
Wellogy. And in the West Reach are islands lying farther west than Wellogy. Are 
you certain, Sopli?' 

 The Dyer of Lorbanery grew angry, so that the wincing look came back into 
his eyes; but he did not talk madly, Arren thought, as he had when they first spoke 
with him many days ago on Lorbanery. "Yes. We must land here. We have gone far enough. 
The place we seek is here. Do you want me to swear that I know it? Shall I swear 
by my name?" 

 "You cannot," Sparrowhawk said, his voice hard, looking up at Sopli who was 
taller than he; Sopli had stood up, holding on tight to the mast, to look at the 
land ahead. "Don't try, Sopli." 

 The Dyer scowled as if in rage or pain. He looked at the mountains lying blue 
with distance before the boat, over the heaving, trembling plain of water, and said, 
"You took me as guide. This is the place. We must land here." 

 "We'll land in any case; we must have water," said Sparrowhawk, and went to 
the tiller. Sopli sat down in his place by the mast, muttering. Arren heard him 
say, "I swear by my name. By my name," many times, and each time he said it, he 
scowled again as if in pain. 

 They beat closer to the island on a north wind and coasted it seeking a bay 
or landing, but the breakers beat thunderous in the hot sunlight on all the northern 
shore. Inland green mountains stood baking in that light, treeclothed to the peaks. 

 Rounding a cape, they came at last in sight of a deep crescent bay with white 
sand beaches. Here the waves came in quietly, their force held off by the cape, 


and a boat might land. No sign of human life was visible on the beach or in the 
forests above it; they had not seen a boat, a roof, a wisp of smoke. The light breeze 
dropped as soon as Lookfar entered the bay. It was still, silent, hot. Arren took 
the oars, Sparrowhawk steered. The creak of the oars in the locks was the only sound. 
The green peaks loomed above the bay, closing in around. The sun laid sheets of 
white-hot light on the water. Arren heard the blood drumming in his ears. Sopli 
had left the safety of the mast and crouched in the prow, holding onto the gunwales, 
staring and straining forward to the land. Sparrowhawk's dark, scarred face shone 
with sweat as if it had been oiled; his glance shifted continually from the low 
breakers to the foliage-screened bluffs above. 

 "Now," he said to Arren and the boat. Arren took three great strokes with 
the oars, and lightly Lookfar came up on the sand. Sparrowhawk leapt out to push 
the boat clear up on the last impetus of the waves. As he put his hands out to push, 
he stumbled and half-fell, catching himself against the stern. With a mighty strain 
he dragged the boat back into the water on the outward wash of the wave, and 
floundered in over the gunwale as she hung between sea and shore. "Row!" he gasped 
out, and crouched on all fours, streaming with water and trying to get his breath. 
He was holding a spear - a bronze-headed throwing spear two feet long. Where had 
he gotten it? Another spear appeared as Arren hung bewildered on the oars; it struck 
a thwart edgewise, splintering the wood, and rebounded end over end. On the low 
bluffs over the beach, under the trees, figures moved, darting and crouching. There 
were little whistling, whirring noises in the air. Arren suddenly bent his head 
between his shoulders, bent his back, and rowed with powerful strokes: two to clear 
the shallows, three to turn the boat, and away. 

 Sopli, in the prow of the boat behind Arren's back, began to shout. Arren's 
arms were seized suddenly so that the oars shot up out of the water. The butt of 
one struck him in the pit of the stomach, so that for a moment he was blind and 
breathless. "Turn back! Turn back!" Sopli was shouting. The boat leapt in the water 
all at once, and rocked. Arren turned as soon as he had got his grip on the oars 
again, furious. Sopli was not in the boat. 

 All around them the deep water of the bay heaved and dazzled in the sunlight. 

 Stupidly, Arren looked behind him again, then at Sparrowhawk crouching in 
the stern. "There," Sparrowhawk said, pointing alongside, but there was nothing, 
only the sea and the dazzle of the sun. A spear from a throwing-stick fell short 
of the boat by a few yards, entered the water noiselessly, and vanished. Arren rowed 
ten or twelve hard strokes, then backed water and looked once more at Sparrowhawk. 

 Sparrowhawk's hands and left arm were bloody; he held a wad of sailcloth to 
his shoulder. The bronze-headed spear lay in the bottom of the boat. He had not 
been holding it when Arren first saw it; it had been standing out from the hollow 
of his shoulder where the point had gone in. He was scanning the water between them 
and the white beach, where some tiny figures hopped and wavered in the heat-glare. 
At last he said, "Go on." 

 "Sopli-" 

 "He never came up." 

 "Is he drowned?" Arren asked, unbelieving. 

 Sparrowhawk nodded. 

 Arren rowed on until the beach was only a white line beneath the forests and 
the great green peaks. Sparrowhawk sat by the tiller, holding the wad of cloth to 
his shoulder but paying no heed to it. 

 "Did a spear hit him?" 

 "He jumped." 

 "But he- he couldn't swim. He was afraid of the water!" 

 Aye. Mortally afraid. He wanted... He wanted to come to land. 

 "Why did they attack us? Who are they?" 

 "They must have thought us enemies. Will you... give me a hand with this a 
moment?" Arren saw then that the cloth he held pressed against his shoulder was 
soaked and vivid. 


 The spear had struck between the shoulder-joint and collarbone, tearing one 
of the great veins, so that it bled heavily. Under Sparrowhawk's direction, Arren 
tore strips from a linen shirt and made shift to bandage the wound. Sparrowhawk 
asked him for the spear, and when Arren laid it on his knees he put his right hand 
over the blade, long and narrow like a willow leaf, of crudely hammered bronze; 
he made as if to speak, but after a minute he shook his head. "I have no strength 
for spells," he said. "Later. It will be all right. Can you get us out of this bay, 
Arren?" 

 Silently the boy returned to the oars. He bent his back to the work, and soon, 
for there was strength in his smooth, lithe frame, he brought Lookfar out of the 
crescent bay into open water. The long noon calm of the Reach lay on the sea. The 
sail hung slack. The sun glared through a veil of haze, and the green peaks seemed 
to shake and throb in the great heat. Sparrowhawk had stretched out in the bottom 
of the boat, his head propped against the thwart by the tiller; he lay still, lips 
and eyelids half-parted. Arren did not like to look at his face, but stared over 
the boat's stern. Heat-haze wavered above the water, as if veils of cobweb were 
spun out over the sky. His arms trembled with fatigue, but he rowed on. 

 "Where are you taking us?" Sparrowhawk asked hoarsely, sitting up a little. 
Turning, Arren saw the crescent bay curving its green arms about the boat once more, 
the white line of the beach ahead, and the mountains gathered in the air above. 
He had turned the boat around without knowing it. 

 "I can't row any more," he said, stowing the oars and going to crouch in the 
prow. He kept thinking Sopli was behind him in the boat, by the mast. They had been 
many days together, and his death had been too sudden, too reasonless to be 
understood. Nothing was to be understood. 

 The boat hung swaying on the water, the sail slack on the spar. The tide, 
beginning to enter the bay, turned Lookfar slowly broadside to the current and 
pushed her by little nudges in and in, toward the distant white line of the beach. 

 "Lookfar," the mage said caressingly, and a word or two in the Old Speech; 
and softly the boat rocked and nosed outward and slipped over the blazing sea away 
from the arms of the bay. 

 But as slowly and softly, in less than an hour, she ceased to make way, and 
again the sail hung slack. Arren looked back in the boat and saw his companion lying 
as before, but his head had dropped back a little, and his eyes were closed. 

 All this while Arren had felt a heavy, sickly horror, which grew on him and 
held him from action as if winding his body and mind in fine threads. No courage 
rose up in him to fight against the fear; only a kind of dull resentment against 
his lot. 

 He should not let the boat drift here near the rocky shores of a land whose 
people attacked strangers; this was clear to his mind, but it did not mean much. 
What was he to do instead? Row the boat back to Roke? He was lost, utterly lost 
beyond hope, in the vastness of the Reach. He could never bring the boat back through 
those weeks of voyage to any friendly land. Only with the mage's guidance could 
be do it, and Sparrowhawk was hurt and helpless, as suddenly and meaninglessly as 
Sopli was dead. His face was changed, lax-featured and yellowish; he might be dying. 
Arren thought that he should go move him under the awning to keep the sunlight off 
him, and give him water; men who had lost blood needed to drink. But they had been 
short of water for days; the barrel was almost empty. What did it matter? There 
was no good in anything, no use. The luck had run out. 

 Hours went by, the sun beat down, and the greyish heat wrapped Arren round. 
He sat unmoving. 

 A breath of cool passed across his forehead. He looked up. It was evening: 
the sun was down, the west dull red. Lookfar moved slowly under a mild breeze from 
the east, skirting the steep, wooded shores of Obehol. 

 Arren went back in the boat and looked after his companion, arranging him 
a pallet under the awning and giving him water to drink. He did these things 
hurriedly, keeping his eyes from the bandage, which was in need of changing, for 


the wound had not wholly ceased to bleed. Sparrowhawk, in the languor of weakness, 
did not speak; even as he drank eagerly, his eyes closed and he slipped into sleep 
again, that being the greater thirst. He lay silent; and when in the darkness the 
breeze died, no magewind replaced it, and again the boat rocked idly on the smooth, 
heaving water. But now the mountains that loomed to the right were black against 
a sky gorgeous with stars, and for a long time Arren gazed at them. Their outlines 
seemed familiar to him, as if he had seen them before, as if he had known them all 
his life. 

 When he lay down to sleep he faced southward, and there, well up in the sky 
above the blank sea, burned the star Gobardon. Beneath it were the two forming a 
triangle with it, and beneath these, three had risen in a straight line, forming 
a greater triangle. Then, slipping free of the liquid plains of black and silver, 
two more followed as the night wore on; they were yellow like Gobardon, though 
fainter, slanting from right to left from the right base of the triangle. So there 
were eight of the nine stars that were supposed to make the figure of a man, or 
the Hardic rune Agnen. To Arren's eyes there was no man in the pattern, unless, 
as starfigures are, he was strangely distorted; but the rune was plain, with hooked 
arm and cross-stroke, all but the foot, the last stroke to complete it, the star 
that had not yet risen. 

 Watching for it, Arren slept. 

 When he woke in the dawn, Lookfar had drifted farther from Obehol. A mist 
hid the shores and all but the peaks of the mountains, and thinned out into a haze 
above the violet waters of the south, dimming the last stars. 

 He looked at his companion. Sparrowhawk breathed unevenly, as when pain moves 
under the surface of sleep not quite breaking it. His face was lined and old in 
the cold, shadowless light. Arren looking at him saw a man with no power left in 
him, no wizardry, no strength, not even youth, nothing. He had not saved Sopli, 
nor turned away the spear from himself. He had brought them into peril and had not 
saved them. Now Sopli was dead, and he dying, and Arren would die. Through this 
man's fault; and in vain, for nothing. 

 So Arren looked at him with the clear eyes of despair and saw nothing. 

 No memory stirred in him of the fountain under the rowan tree, or of the white 
magelight on the slave-ship in the fog, or of the weary orchards of the House of 
the Dyers. Nor did any pride or stubbornness of will wake in him. He watched dawn 
come over the quiet sea, where low, great swells ran colored like pale amethyst, 
and it was all like a dream, pallid, with no grip or vigor of reality. And at the 
depths of the dream and of the sea, there was nothing - a gap, a void. There were 
no depths. 

 The boat moved forward irregularly and slowly, following the fitful humor 
of the wind. Behind, the peaks of Obehol shrank black against the rising sun, from 
which the wind came, bearing the boat away from land, away from the world, out onto 
the open sea. 

 

 

 

 

------ 

The Children Of the Open Sea 

------ 

 

 Toward the middle of that day Sparrowhawk stirred and asked for water. When 
he had drunk he asked, "Where are we heading?" For the sail was taut above him, 
and the boat dipped like a swallow on the long swells. 

 "West, or north by west." 

 "I'm cold," Sparrowhawk said. The sun blazed down, filling the boat with heat. 

 Arren said nothing. 

 "Try to hold west. Wellogy, west of Obehol. Land there. We need water." 


 The boy looked forward, over the empty sea. 

 "What's the matter, Arren?" 

 He said nothing. 

 Sparrowhawk tried to sit up, and failing that, to reach his staff that lay 
by the gear-box; but it was out of his reach, and when he tried to speak again the 
words halted on his dry lips. The blood broke out anew under the soaked and crusted 
bandage, making a little spider's thread of crimson on the dark skin of his chest. 
He drew breath sharply and closed his eyes. 

 Arren looked at him, but without feeling, and not for long. He went forward 
and resumed his crouching position in the prow, gazing forward. His mouth was very 
dry. The east wind that now blew steady over the open sea was as dry as a desert 
wind. There were only two or three pints of water left in their cask; these were, 
in Arren's mind, for Sparrowhawk, not for himself; it never occurred to him to drink 
from that water. He had set out fishing lines, having learned since they left 
Lorbanery that raw fish fulfills both thirst and hunger; but there was never 
anything on the lines. It did not matter. The boat moved on over the desert of water. 
Over the boat, slowly, yet winning the race in the end by all the width of heaven, 
the sun moved also from east to west. 

 Once Arren thought he saw a blue height in the south that might have been 
land or cloud; the boat had been running somewhat north of west for hours. He did 
not try to tack and turn, but let her go on. The land might or might not be real; 
it did not matter. To him all the vast, fiery glory of wind and light and ocean 
was dim and false. 

 Darkness came, and light again, and dark, and light, like drumbeats on the 
tight-stretched canvas of the sky. 

 He trailed his hand in the water over the side of the boat. For an instant 
he saw that, vivid: his hand pale greenish beneath the living water. He bent and 
sucked the wet off his fingers. It was bitter, burning his lips painfully, but he 
did it again. Then he was sick, and crouched down vomiting, but only a little bile 
burned his throat. There was no more water to give Sparrowhawk, and he was afraid 
to go near him. He lay down, shivering despite the heat. It was all silent, dry, 
and bright: terribly bright. He hid his eyes from the light. 

 

 They stood in the boat, three of them, stalk-thin and angular, great-eyed, 
like strange dark herons or cranes. Their voices were thin, like birds' voices. 
He did not understand them. One knelt above him with a dark bladder on his arm and 
tipped from it into Arren's mouth: it was water. Arren drank avidly, choked, drank 
again till he had drained the container. Then he looked about and struggled to his 
feet, saying, "Where is, where is he?" For in Lookfar with him were only the three 
strange, slender men. 

 They looked at him uncomprehending. 

 "The other man," he croaked, his raw throat and stiff-caked lips unfit to 
form the words, "my friend-" 

 One of them understood his distress if not his words, and putting a slight 
hand on his arm, pointed with the other. "There," he said, reassuring. 

 Arren looked. And he saw, ahead of the boat and northward of her, some gathered 
in close and others strung far out across the sea, rafts: so many rafts that they 
lay like autumn leaves on a pool. Low to the water, each bore one or two cabins 
or huts near the center, and several had masts stepped. Like leaves they floated, 
rising and falling very softly as the vast swells of the western ocean passed under 
them. The lanes of water shone like silver between them, and over them towered great 
violet and golden rainclouds, darkening the west. 

 "There," the man said, pointing to a great raft near Lookfar. 

 "Alive?" 

 They all looked at him, and at last one understood. "Alive. He is alive." 
At this Arren began to weep, a dry sobbing, and one of the men took his wrist in 
a strong and narrow hand and drew him out of Lookfar and onto a raft to which the 


boat had been made fast. The raft was so great and buoyant that it did not dip even 
slightly to their weight. The man led Arren across it, while one of the others 
reached out with a heavy gaff tipped with a curving whaleshark's tooth and hauled 
a nearby raft closer, till they could step the gap. There he led Arren to the shelter 
or cabin, which was open on one side and closed with woven screens on the other 
three. "Lie down," he said, and beyond that Arren knew nothing at all. 

 

 He was lying on his back, stretched out flat, gazing up at a rough green roof 
dappled with tiny dots of light. He thought he was in the apple orchards of Semermine, 
where the princes of Enlad pass their summers, in the hills behind Berila; be thought 
he was lying in the thick grass at Semermine, looking up at the sunlight between 
apple boughs. 

 After a while he heard the slap and jostle of water in the hollow places 
underneath the raft, and the thin voices of the raft-people speaking a tongue that 
was the common Hardic of the Archipelago, but much changed in sounds and rhythms, 
so that it was hard to understand; and so he knew where he was- out beyond the 
Archipelago, beyond the Reach, beyond all isles, lost on the open sea. But still 
he was untroubled, lying as comfortably as if he lay in the grass in the orchards 
of his home. 

 He thought after a while that he ought to get up, and did so, finding his 
body very thin and burnt-looking and his legs shaky but serviceable. He pushed aside 
the woven hanging that made the walls of the shelter and stepped out into the 
afternoon. It had rained while he slept. The wood of the raft, great, smooth-shapen, 
squared logs, fit close and caulked, was dark with wet, and the hair of the thin, 
halfnaked people was black and lank from the rain. But half the sky was clear where 
the sun stood in the west, and the clouds now rode to the far northeast in heaps 
of silver. 

 One of the men came up to Arren, warily, stopping some feet from him. He was 
slight and short, no taller than a boy of twelve; his eyes were long, large, and 
dark. He carried a spear with a barbed ivory head. Arren said to him, "I owe my 
life to you and your people." 

 The man nodded. 

 "Will you take me to my companion?" 

 Turning away, the raft-man raised his voice in a high, piercing cry like the 
call of a sea bird. Then he squatted down on his heels as if to wait, and Arren 
did the same. 

 The rafts had masts, though the mast of the one they were on was not stepped. 
On these, sails could be run up, small compared to the breadth of the raft. The 
sails were of a brown material, not canvas or linen, but a fibrous stuff that looked 
not woven but beaten together, as felt is made. A raft some quarter mile away let 
the brown sail down from the crosstree by ropes and slowly worked its way, gaffing 
and poling off the other rafts between, till it came alongside the one Arren was 
on. When there was only three feet of water between, the man beside Arren got up 
and nonchalantly hopped across. Arren did the same and landed awkwardly on all fours; 
there was no spring left in his knees. He picked himself up and found the little 
man looking at him, not with amusement, but with approval: Arren's composure had 
evidently won his respect. 

 This raft was larger and higher out of the water than any other, made of logs 
forty feet in length and four or five feet wide, blackened and smooth with use and 
weather. Strangely carven statues of wood stood about the several shelters or 
enclosures on it, and tall poles bearing tufts of sea birds' feathers stood at the 
four corners. His guide took him to the smallest of the shelters, and there he saw 
Sparrowhawk lying asleep. 

 Arren sat down inside the shelter. His guide went back to the other raft, 
and nobody bothered him. After an hour or so a woman brought him food: a kind of 
cold fish stew with bits of some transparent green stuff in it, salty but good; 
and a small cup of water, stale, tasting pitchy from the caulking of the barrel. 


He saw by the way she gave him the water that it was a treasure that she gave him, 
a thing to be honored. He drank it respectfully and asked for no more, though he 
could have drunk ten times the cupful. 

 Sparrowhawk's shoulder had been skillfully bandaged; he slept deeply and 
easily. When he woke up, his eyes were clear. He looked at Arren and smiled the 
sweet, joyous smile that was always startling on his hard face. Arren felt suddenly 
like weeping again. He put his hand on Sparrowhawk's hand and said nothing. 

 One of the raft-folk approached and squatted down in the shade of the large 
shelter nearby: a kind of temple, it appeared to be, with a square design of great 
complexity above the doorway, and the doorjambs made of logs carved in the shape 
of grey whales sounding. This man was short and thin like the others, boy-like in 
frame, but his face was strong-featured and weathered by the years. He wore nothing 
but a loincloth, but dignity clothed him amply. "He must sleep," he said, and Arren 
left Sparrowhawk and came to him. 

 "You are the chief of this folk," Arren said, knowing a prince when he saw 
one. 

 "I am," the man said, with a short nod. Arren stood before him, erect and 
unmoving. Presently the man's dark eyes met his briefly: "You are a chief also," 
he observed. 

 "I am," Arren answered. He would have liked very much to know how the raftman 
knew it, but remained impassive. "But I serve my lord, there." 

 The chief of the raft-folk said something Arren did not understand at all: 
certain words changed out of recognition or names he did not know; then he said, 
"Why came you into Balatran?" 

 "Seeking-" 

 But Arren did not know how much to say, nor indeed what to say. All that had 
happened, and the matter of their quest, seemed very long ago and was confused in 
his mind. At last he said, "We came to Obehol. They attacked us when we came to 
land. My lord was hurt." 

 "And you?" 

 "I was not hurt," Arren said, and the cold self-possession he had learnt in 
his courtly childhood served him well. "But there was- there was something like 
a madness. One who was with us drowned himself. There was a fear-" He stopped, and 
stood silent. 

 The chief watched him with black, opaque eyes. At last he said, "You come 
by chance here, then." 

 "Yes. Are we still in the South Reach?" 

 "Reach? No. The islands-" The chief moved his slender, black hand in an arc, 
no more than a quarter of the compass, north to east. "The islands are there," he 
said. "All the islands." Then showing all the evening sea before them, from north 
through west to south, he said, "The sea." 

 "What land are you from, lord?" 

 "No land. We are the Children of the Open Sea." 

 Arren looked at his keen face. He looked about him at the great raft with 
its temple and its tall idols, each carved from a single tree, great god-figures 
mixed of dolphin, fish, man, and sea bird; at the people busy at their work, weaving, 
carving, fishing, cooking on raised platforms, tending babies; at the other rafts, 
seventy at least, scattered out over the water in a great circle perhaps a mile 
across. It was a town: smoke rising in thin wisps from distant houses, the voices 
of children high on the wind. It was a town, and under its floors was the abyss. 

 "Do you never come to land?" the boy asked in a low voice. 

 "Once each year. We go to the Long Dune. We cut wood there and refit the rafts. 
That is in autumn, and after that we follow the gray whales north. In winter we 
go apart, each raft alone. In the spring we come to Balatran and meet. There is 
going from raft to raft then, there are marriages, and the Long Dance is held. These 
are the Roads of Balatran; from here the great current bears south. In summer we 
drift south upon the great current until we see the Great Ones, the grey whales, 


turning northward. Then we follow them, returning at last to the beaches of Emah 
on the Long Dune, for a little while." 

 "This is most wonderful, my lord," said Arren. "Never did I hear of such a 
people as yours. My home is very far from here. Yet there too, in the island of 
Enlad, we dance the Long Dance on midsummer eve." 

 "You stamp the earth down and make it safe," the chief said dryly. "We dance 
on the deep sea." 

 After a time he asked, "How is he called, your lord?" 

 "Sparrowhawk," Arren said. The chief repeated the syllables, but they clearly 
had no meaning for him. And that more than any other thing made Arren understand 
that the tale was true, that these people lived on the sea year in, year out, on 
the open sea past any land or scent of land, beyond the flight of the land birds, 
outside the knowledge of men. 

 "There was death in him," the chief said. "He must sleep. You go back to Star's 
raft; I will send for you." He stood up. Though perfectly sure of himself, he was 
apparently not quite sure what Arren was; whether he should treat him as an equal 
or as a boy. Arren preferred the latter, in this situation, and accepted his 
dismissal, but then faced a problem of his own. The rafts had drifted apart again, 
and a hundred yards of satiny water rippled between the two. 

 The chief of the Children of the Open Sea spoke to him once more, briefly. 
"Swim," he said. 

 Arren let himself gingerly into the water. Its cool was pleasant on his 
sun-baked skin. He swam across and hauled himself out on the other raft, to find 
a group of five or six children and young people watching him with undisguised 
interest. A very small girl said, "You swim like a fish on a hook." 

 "How should I swim?" asked Arren, a little mortified, but polite; indeed he 
could not have been rude to a human being so very small. She looked like a polished 
mahogany statuette, fragile, exquisite. "Like this!" she cried, and dived like a 
seal into the dazzle and liquid roil of the waters. Only after a long time, and 
at an improbable distance, did he hear her shrill cry and see her black, sleek head 
above the surface. 

 "Come on," said a boy who was probably Arren's age, though he looked not more 
than twelve in height and build: a grave-faced fellow, with a blue crab tattooed 
all across his back. He dived, and all dived, even the three-year-old; so Arren 
had to and did so, trying not to splash. 

 "Like an eel," said the boy, coming up by his shoulder. 

 "Like a dolphin," said a pretty girl with a pretty smile, and vanished in 
the depths. 

 "Like me!" squeaked the three-year-old, bobbing like a bottle. 

 So that evening until dark, and all the next long golden day and the days 
that followed, Arren swam and talked and worked with the young people of Star's 
raft. And of all the events of his voyage since that morning of the equinox when 
he and Sparrowhawk left Roke, this seemed to him in some way the strangest; for 
it had nothing to do with all that had gone before, in the voyage or in all his 
life; and even less to do with what was yet to come. At night, lying down to sleep 
among the others under the stars, he thought, "It is as if I were dead, and this 
is an afterlife, here in the sunlight, beyond the edge of the world, among the sons 
and daughters of the sea..." 

 Before he slept he would look in the far south for the yellow star and the 
figure of the Rune of Ending, and always he saw Gobardon and the lesser or the greater 
triangle; but it rose later now, and he could not keep his eyes open till the whole 
figure stood free of the horizon. By night and by day the rafts drifted southward, 
but there was never any change in the sea, for the ever-changing does not change; 
the rainstorms of May passed over, and at night the stars shone, and all day the 
sun. 

 He knew that their life could not be lived always in this dreamlike case. 
He asked of winter, and they told him of the long rains and the mighty swells, the 


single rafts, each separated from all the rest, drifting and plunging along through 
the grey and darkness, week after week after week. Last winter in a month-long storm 
they had seen waves so great they were "like thunderclouds," they said, for they 
had not seen hills. From the back of one wave the next could be seen, immense, miles 
away, rushing hugely toward them. Could the rafts ride such seas? he asked, and 
they said yes, but not always. In the spring when they gathered at the Roads of 
Balatran there would be two rafts missing, or three, or six... 

 They married very young. Bluecrab, the boy tattooed with his namesake, and 
the pretty girl Albatross were man and wife, though he was just seventeen and she 
two years younger; there were many such marriages between the rafts. Many babies 
crept and toddled about the rafts, tied by long leashes to the four posts of the 
central shelter, all crawling into it in the heat of the day and sleeping in 
wriggling heaps. The older children tended the younger, and men and women shared 
in all the work. All took their turn at gathering the great, brown-leaved seaweeds, 
the nilgu of the Roads, fringed like fern and eighty or a hundred feet long. All 
worked together at pounding the nilgu into cloth and braiding the coarse fibers 
for ropes and nets; at fishing and drying the fish and shaping whale-ivory into 
tools, and all the other tasks of the rafts. But there was always time for swimming 
and for talking, and never a time by which a task must be finished. There were no 
hours: only whole days, whole nights. After a few such days and nights it seemed 
to Arren that he had lived on the raft for time uncountable, and Obehol was a dream, 
and behind that were fainter dreams, and in some other world he had lived on land 
and been a prince in Enlad. 

 When he was summoned at last to the chief's raft, Sparrowhawk looked at him 
a while and said, "You look like that Arren whom I saw in the Court of the Fountain: 
sleek as a golden seal. It suits you here, lad." 

 "Aye, my lord." 

 "But where is here? We have left places behind us. We have sailed off the 
maps... Long ago I heard tell of the RaftFolk, but thought it only one more tale 
of the South Reach, a fancy without substance. Yet we were rescued by that fancy, 
and our lives saved by a myth" 

 He spoke smilingly, as though he had shared in that timeless ease of life 
in the summer light; but his face was gaunt, and in his eyes lay an unlighted darkness. 
Arren saw that and faced it. 

 "I betrayed-" he said, and stopped. "I betrayed your trust in me." 

 "How so, Arren?. 

 "There- at Obehol. When for once you needed me. You were hurt and needed my 
help. I did nothing. The boat drifted, and I let her drift. You were in pain, and 
I did nothing for you. I saw land- I saw land, and did not even try to turn the 
boat-" 

 "Be still, lad," the mage said with such firmness that Arren obeyed. And 
presently, "Tell me what you thought at that time." 

 "Nothing, my lord- nothing! I thought there was no use in doing anything. 
I thought your wizardry was gone- no, that it had never been. That you had tricked 
me." The sweat broke out on Arren's face and he had to force his voice, but he went 
on. "I was afraid of you. I was afraid of death. I was so afraid of it I would not 
look at you, because you might be dying. I could think of nothing, except that there 
was- there was a way of not dying for me, if I could find it. But all the time life 
was running out, as if there was a great wound and the blood running from it -such 
as you had. But this was in everything. And I did nothing, nothing, but try to hide 
from the horror of dying." 

 He stopped, for saying the truth aloud was unendurable. It was not shame that 
stopped him, but fear, the same fear. He knew now why this tranquil life in sea 
and sunlight on the rafts seemed to him like an after-life or a dream, unreal. It 
was because he knew in his heart that reality was empty: without life or warmth 
or color or sound: without meaning. There were no heights or depths. All this lovely 
play of form and light and color on the sea and in the eyes of men, was no more 


than that: a playing of illusions on the shallow void. 

 They passed, and there remained the shapelessness and the cold. Nothing else. 

 Sparrowhawk was looking at him, and he had looked down to avoid that gaze. 
But there spoke in Arren unexpectedly a little voice of courage or of mockery: it 
was arrogant and pitiless, and it said, "Coward! Coward! Will you throw even this 
away?" 

 So he looked up, with a great effort of his will, and met his companion's 
eyes. 

 Sparrowhawk reached out and took his hand in a hard grasp, so that both by 
eye and by flesh they touched. He said Arren's true name, which he had never spoken: 
"Lebannen." Again he said it: "Lebannen, this is. And thou art. There is no safety, 
and there is no end. The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to 
see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible 
abyss." 

 Arren clenched his hands and bent his forehead down till it pressed against 
Sparrowhawk's hand. "I failed you," he said. "I will fail you again and fail myself. 
I have not strength enough!" 

 "You have strength enough." The mage's voice was tender, but beneath 
tenderness was that same hardness that had risen in the depths of Arren's own shame, 
and mocked him. "What you love, you will love. What you undertake, you will complete. 
You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little 
armor against despair... Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life." 

 "But I sought death- yours and mine!" Arren lifted his head and stared at 
Sparrowhawk. "Like Sopli who drowned himself-" 

 "Sopli was not seeking death. He sought to escape from it and from life. He 
sought safety: an end to fear- to the fear of death." 

 "But there is- there is a way. There is a way beyond death. Back to life. 
To life beyond death, life without death. That is what they seek. Hare and Sopli, 
the ones who were wizards. That is what we seek. You -you above all must know- must 
know of that way-" 

 The mage's strong hand was still on his. "I do not," Sparrowhawk said. "Aye, 
I know what they think they seek. But I know it to be a lie. Listen to me, Arren. 
You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing 
is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a 
great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what 
we are willing to lose... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, 
and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would 
you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself? 
Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the 
light of sunrise and sunset, to buy safety for yourself - safety forever? That is 
what they seek to do on Wathort and Lorbanery and elsewhere. That is the message 
that those who know how to hear have heard: By denying life you may deny death and 
live forever! -And this message I do not hear, Arren, for I will not hear it. I 
will not take the counsel of despair. I am deaf; I am blind. You are my guide. You 
in your innocence and your courage, in your unwisdom and your loyalty, you are my 
guide- the child I send before me into the dark. It is your fear, your pain, I follow. 
You have thought me harsh to you, Arren; you never knew how harsh. I use your love 
as a man burns a candle, burns it away, to light his steps. And we must go on. We 
must go on. We must go all the way. We must come to the place where the sea runs 
dry and joy runs out, the place to which your mortal terror draws you." 

 "Where is it, my lord?" 

 "I do not know." 

 "I cannot lead you there. But I will come with you." 

 The mage's gaze on him was somber, unfathomable. 

 "But if I should fail again and betray you-" 

 "I will trust you, son of Morred." 

 Then both were silent. 


 Above them the tall, carven idols rocked very slightly against the blue 
southern sky: dolphin bodies, gulls' wings folded, human faces with staring eyes 
of shell. 

 Sparrowhawk got up stiffly, for he was still far from being fully healed of 
his wound. "I am tired of sitting about," he said. "I shall grow fat in idleness." 
He began to pace the length of the raft, and Arren joined him. They talked a little 
as they walked; Arren told Sparrowhawk how he spent his days, who his friends among 
the raft-folk were. Sparrowhawk's restlessness was greater than his strength, which 
soon gave out. He stopped by a girl who was weaving nilgu on her loom behind the 
House of the Great Ones, asking her to seek out the chief for him, and then returned 
to his shelter. There the chief of the raft-folk came, greeting him with courtesy, 
which the mage returned; and all three of them sat down together on the spotted 
sealskin rugs of the shelter. 

 "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 land-folk 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 land-folk, 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 land-folk, 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 land-folk, the land-folk 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 a while, 
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. 

 

 

 

------ 

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 chiefs 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 faroff 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 Ea, 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 in 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 
arkvaissa!"-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 that 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 light-heartedness 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 watercask, 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. 

 The image faded, and there was nothing but the blinding disk of the noon sun 
reflected in the water in the cask. 

 "There," Sparrowhawk said, looking at Arren with a strange, mocking look, 
"there, if I could ever go back there, not even you could follow me." 

 

 Land lay ahead, low and blue in the afternoon like a bank of mist. "Is it 
Selidor?" Arren asked, and his heart beat fast, but the mage answered, "Obb, I think, 
or Jessage. We're not half way yet, lad." 

 That night they sailed the straits between those two islands. They saw no 
lights, but there was a reek of smoke in the air, so heavy that their lungs grew 
raw with breathing it. When day came and they looked back, the eastern isle, Jessage, 
looked burnt and black as far as they could see inland from the shore, and a haze 
hung blue and dull above it. 

 "They have burnt the fields," Arren said. 

 "Aye. And the villages. I have smelled that smoke before." 

 "Are they savages, here in the West?" 

 Sparrowhawk shook his head. "Farmers; townsmen." 

 Arren stared at the black ruin of the land, the withered trees of orchards 
against the sky; and his face was hard. "What harm have the trees done them?" he 
said. "Must they punish the grass for their own faults? Men are savages, who would 
set a land afire because they have a quarrel with other men." 

 "They have no guidance," Sparrowhawk said. "No king; and the kingly men and 
the wizardly men, all turned aside and drawn into their minds, are hunting the door 
through death. So it was in the South, and so I guess it to be here." 

 "And this is one man's doing - the one the dragon spoke of? It seems not 
possible." 

 "Why not? If there were a King of the Isles, he would be one man. And he would 
rule. One man may as easily destroy, as govern: be King or Anti-King." 

 There was again that note in his voice of mockery or challenge which roused 
Arren's temper. 

 "A king has servants, soldiers, messengers, lieutenants. He governs through 
his servants. Where are the servants of this-Anti-King?" 

 "In our minds, lad. In our minds. The traitor, the self; the self that cries 
I want to live; let the world burn so long as I can live! The little traitor soul 
in us, in the dark, like the worm in the apple. He talks to all of us. But only 
some understand him. The wizards and the sorcerers. The singers; the makers. And 
the heroes, the ones who seek to be themselves. To be one's self is a rare thing 
and a great one. To be one's self forever: is that not better still?" 

 Arren looked straight at Sparrowhawk. "You would say to me that it is not 
better. But tell me why. I was a child when I began this voyage, a child who did 
not believe in death. You think me a child still, but I have learnt something, not 
much, maybe, but something; I have learnt that death exists and that I am to die. 
But I have not learnt to rejoice in the knowledge, to welcome my death or yours. 
If I love life, shall I not hate the end of it? Why should I not desire immortality?" 

 Arren's fencing-master in Berila had been a man of about sixty, short and 
bald and cold. Arren had disliked him for years, though he knew him to be an 
extraordinary swordsman. But one day in practice he had caught his master off guard 
and nearly disarmed him, and he had never forgotten the incredulous, incongruous 
happiness that had suddenly gleamed in the master's cold face, the hope, the joy 
-an equal, at last an equal! From that moment on, the fencing-master had trained 
him mercilessly, and whenever they fenced, that same relentless smile would be on 
the old man's face, brightening as Arren pressed him harder. And it was on 
Sparrowhawk's face now, the flash of steel in sunlight. 

 "Why should you not desire immortality? How should you not? Every soul desires 


it, and its health is in the strength of its desire. -But be careful; you are one 
who might achieve your desire." 

 "And then?" 

 "And then this: a false king ruling, the arts of man forgotten, the singer 
tongueless, the eye blind. This! - this blight and plague on the lands, this sore 
we seek to heal. There are two, Arren, two that make one: the world and the shadow, 
the light and the dark. The two poles of the Balance. Life rises out of death, death 
rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to 
each other and are forever reborn. And with them all is reborn, the flower of the 
apple tree, the light of the stars. In life is death. In death is rebirth. What 
then is life without death? Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal? -What is it but 
death- death without rebirth?" 

 "If so much hinges on it, then, my lord, if one man's life might wreck the 
Balance of the Whole, surely it is not possible -it would not be allowed-" He halted, 
confused. 

 "Who allows? Who forbids?" 

 "I do not know." 

 "Nor I. But I know how much evil one man, one life, can do. I know it all 
too well. I know it because I have done it. I have done the same evil, in the same 
folly of pride. I opened the door between the worlds just a crack, just a little 
crack, just to show that I was stronger than death itself... I was young and had 
not met death-like you... It took the strength of the Archmage Nemmerle, it took 
his mastery and his life, to shut that door. You can see the mark that night left 
on me, on my face; but him it killed. Oh, the door between the light and the darkness 
can be opened, Arren; it takes strength, but it can be done. But to shut it again, 
there's a different story." 

 "But my lord, what you speak of surely is different from this-" 

 "Why? Because I am a good man?" That coldness of steel, of the falcon's eye, 
was in Sparrowhawk's look again. "What is a good man, Arren? Is a good man one who 
would not do evil, who would not open a door to the darkness, who has no darkness 
in him? Look again, lad. Look a little farther; you will need what you learn, to 
go where you must go. Look into yourself! Did you not hear a voice say Come? Did 
you not follow?" 

 "I did. I- I have not forgotten. But I thought... I thought that voice was... 
his." 

 "Aye, it was his. And it was yours. How could he speak to you, across the 
seas, but in your own voice? How is it that he calls to those who know how to listen, 
the mages and the makers and the seekers, who heed the voice within them? How is 
it that he does not call to me? It is because I will not listen; I will not hear 
that voice again. You were born to power, Arren, as I was; power over men, over 
men's souls; and what is that but power over life and death? You are young, you 
stand on the borders of possibility, on the shadowland, in the realm of dream, and 
you hear the voice saying Come. But I, who am old, who have done what I must do, 
who stand in the daylight facing my own death, the end of all possibility, I know 
that there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the 
power, not to take, but to accept." 

 Jessage was far behind them now, a blue smudge on the sea, a stain. 

 "Then I am his servant," Arren said. 

 "You are. And I am yours." 

 "But who is he, then? What is he?" 

 "A man, I think - even as you and I." 

 "That man you spoke of once - the wizard of Havnor, who summoned up the dead? 
Is it he?" 

 "It may well be. He had great power, and it was all bent on denying death. 
And he knew the Great Spells of the Lore of Paln. I was young and a fool when I 
used that lore, and I brought ruin on myself. But if an old man and a strong one 
used it, careless of all consequence, he might bring ruin on us all." 


 "Were you not told that that man was dead?" 

 "Aye," said Sparrowhawk "I was." 

 And they said no more. 

 That night the sea was full of fire. The sharp waves thrown back by Lookfar's 
prow and the movement of every fish through the surface water were all outlined 
and alive with light. Arren sat with his arm on the gunwale and his head on his 
arm, watching those curves and whorls of silver radiance. He put his hand in the 
water and raised it again, and light ran softly from his fingers. "Look," he said, 
"I too am a wizard." 

 "That gift you have not," said his companion. 

 "Much good I shall be to you without it," said Arren, gazing at the restless 
shimmer of the waves, "when we meet our enemy." 

 For he had hoped -from the very beginning he had hoped- that the reason the 
Archmage had chosen him and him alone for this voyage was that he had some inborn 
power, descended from his ancestor Morred, which would in the ultimate need and 
the blackest hour be revealed: and so he would save himself and his lord and all 
the world from the enemy. But lately he had looked once more at that hope, and it 
was as if he saw it from a great distance; it was like remembering that, when he 
was a very little boy, he had had a burning desire to try on his father's crown, 
and had wept when he was forbidden to. This hope was as ill-timed, as childish. 
There was no magery in him. There never would be. 

 The time might come, indeed, when he could, when he must, put on his father's 
crown and rule as Prince of Enlad. But that seemed a small thing now, and his home 
a small place, and remote. There was no disloyalty in this. Only his loyalty had 
grown greater, being fixed upon a greater model and a broader hope. He had learned 
his own weakness also, and by it had learned to measure his strength; and he knew 
that he was strong. But what use was strength if he had no gift, nothing to offer, 
still, to his lord but his service and his steady love? Where they were going, would 
those be enough? 

 Sparrowhawk said only, "To see a candle's light, one must take it into a dark 
place." With that Arren tried to comfort himself; but he did not find it very 
comforting. 

 Next morning when they awoke, the air was grey and the water was grey. Over 
the mast the sky brightened to the blue of an opal, for the fog lay low. To Northern 
men such as Arren of Enlad and Sparrowhawk of Gont, the fog was welcome, like an 
old friend. Softly it enclosed the boat so that they could not see far, and it was 
to them like being in a familiar room after many weeks of bright and barren space 
and the wind blowing. They were coming back into their own climate, and were now 
perhaps at the latitude of Roke. 

 

 Some seven hundred miles east of those fog-clad waters where Lookfar sailed, 
clear sunlight shone on the leaves of the trees of the Immanent Grove, on the green 
crown of Roke Knoll, and on the high slate roofs of the Great House. 

 In a room in the south tower, a magicians' workroom cluttered with retorts 
and alembics and great-bellied, crook-necked bottles, thick-walled furnaces and 
tiny heating-lamps, tongs, bellows, stands, pliers, pipes, a thousand boxes and 
vials and stoppered jugs marked with Hardic or more secret runes, and all such 
paraphernalia of alchemy, glass-blowing, metal-refining, and the arts of healing, 
in that room among the much-encumbered tables and benches stood the Master Changer 
and the Master Summoner of Roke. 

 In his hands the grey-haired Changer held a great stone like a diamond 
uncarved. It was a rock-crystal, colored faintly deep within with amethyst and rose, 
but clear as water. Yet as the eye looked into that clarity, it found unclarity, 
and neither reflection nor image of what was real round about, but only planes and 
depths ever farther, ever deeper, until it was led quite into dream and found no 
way out. This was the Stone of Shelieth. It had long been kept by the princes of 
Way, sometimes as a mere bauble of their treasury, sometimes as a charm for sleep, 


sometimes for a more baneful purpose: for those who looked too long and without 
understanding into that endless depth of crystal might go mad. The Archmage Gensher 
of Way, coming to Roke, had brought with him the Stone of Shelieth, for in the hands 
of a mage it held the truth. 

 Yet the truth varies with the man. 

 Therefore the Changer, holding the stone and looking through its bossed, 
uneven surface into the infinite, palecolored, shimmering depths, spoke aloud to 
tell what he saw. "I see the earth, even as though I stood on Mount Orm in the center 
of the world and beheld all beneath my feet, even to the farthest isle of the farthest 
Reaches, and beyond. And all is clear. I see ships in the lanes of Ilien, and the 
hearthfires of Torheven, and the roofs of this tower where we stand now. But past 
Roke, nothing. In the south, no lands. In the west, no lands. I cannot see Wathort 
where it should be, nor any isle of the West Reach, even so close as Pendor. And 
Osskil and Ebosskil, where are they? There is a mist on Enlad, a greyness, like 
a spider's web. Each time I look, more islands are gone and the sea where they were 
is empty and unbroken, even as it was before the Making-" and his voice stumbled 
on the last word as if it came with difficulty to his lips. 

 He set the stone down on its ivory stand and stood away from it. His kindly 
face looked drawn. He said, "Tell me what you see." 

 The Master Summoner took up the crystal in his hands and turned it slowly 
as if seeking on its rough, glassy surface an entrance of vision. A long time he 
handled it, his face intent. At last he set it down and said, "Changer, I see little. 
Fragments, glimpses, making no whole." 

 The grey-haired Master clenched his hands. "Is that not strange in itself?" 

 "How so?" 

 "Are your eyes often blind?" the Changer cried, as if enraged. "Do you not 
see that there is..." and he stammered several times before he could speak, "Do 
you not see that there is a hand upon your eyes, even as there is a hand over my 
mouth?" 

 The Summoner said, "You are overwrought, my lord." 

 "Summon the Presence of the Stone," said the Changer, controlling himself, 
but speaking in a somewhat stifled voice. 

 "Why?" 

 "Why, because I ask you." 

 "Come, Changer, do you dare me - like boys before a bear's den? Are we 
children?" 

 "Yes! Before what I see in the Stone of Shelieth, I am a child - a frightened 
child. Summon the Presence of the Stone. Must I beg you, my lord?" 

 "No," said the tall Master, but he frowned, and turned from the older man. 
Then stretching wide his arms in the great gesture that begins the spells of his 
art, he raised his head and spoke the syllables of invocation. As he spoke, a light 
grew within the Stone of Shelieth. The room darkened about it; shadows gathered. 
When the shadows were deep and the stone was very bright, he brought his hands 
together, lifted the crystal before his face, and looked into its radiance. 

 He was silent some while and then spoke. "I see the Fountains of Shelieth," 
he said softly. "The pools and basins and the waterfalls, the silver-curtained 
dripping caves where ferns grow in banks of moss, the rippled sands, the leaping 
up of the waters and the running of them, the outwelling of deep springs from earth, 
the mystery and sweetness of the source, the spring..." He fell silent again, and 
stood so for a time, his face pale as silver in the light of the stone. Then he 
cried aloud wordlessly, and dropping the crystal with a crash, fell to his knees, 
his face hidden in his hands. 

 There were no shadows. Summer sunlight filled the Jumbled room. The great 
stone lay beneath a table in the dust and litter, unharmed. 

 The Summoner reached out blindly, catching at the other man's hand like a 
child. He drew a deep breath. At last he got up, leaning a little on the Changer, 
and said with unsteady lips and some attempt to smile, "I will not take your dares 


again, my lord." 

 "What saw you, Thorion?" 

 "I saw the fountains. I saw them sink down, and the streams run dry, and the 
lips of the springs of water draw back. And underneath all was black and dry. You 
saw the sea before the Making, but I saw the... what comes after... I saw the 
Unmaking." He wet his lips. "I wish that the Archmage were here," he said. 

 "I wish that we were there with him." 

 "Where? There is none that can find him now." The Summoner looked up at the 
windows that showed the blue, untroubled sky. "No sending can come to him, no 
summoning reach him. He is there where you saw an empty sea. He is coming to the 
place where the springs run dry. He is where our arts do not avail... Yet maybe 
even now there are spells that might reach to him, some of those in the Lore of 
Paln." 

 "But those are spells whereby the dead are brought among the living." 

 "Some bring the living among the dead." 

 "You do not think him dead?" 

 "I think he goes toward death and is drawn toward it. And so are we all. Our 
power is going from us, and our strength, and our hope and luck. The springs are 
running dry." 

 The Changer gazed at him a while with a troubled face. "Do not seek to send 
to him, Thorion," he said at last. "He knew what he sought long before we knew it. 
To him the world is even as this Stone of Shelieth: he looks and sees what is and 
what must be... We cannot help him. The great spells have grown very perilous, and 
of all there is most danger in the Lore of which you spoke. We must stand fast as 
he bade us and look to the walls of Roke and the remembering of the Names." 

 "Aye," said the Summoner. "But I must go and think on this." And he left the 
tower room, walking somewhat stiffly and holding his noble, dark head high. 

 In the morning the Changer sought him. Entering his room after vain knocking, 
he found him stretched asprawl on the stone floor, as if he had been hurled backward 
by a heavy blow. His arms were flung wide as if in the gesture of invocation, but 
his hands were cold, and his open eyes saw nothing. Though the Changer knelt by 
him and called him with a mage's authority, saying his name, Thorion, thrice over, 
yet he lay still. He was not dead, but there was in him only so much life as kept 
his heart beating very slowly, and a little breath in his lungs. The Changer took 
his hands and, holding them, whispered, "O Thorion, I forced you to look into the 
Stone. This is my doing!" Then going hastily from the room he said aloud to those 
he met, Masters and students, "The enemy has reached among us, into Roke the 
well-defended, and has stricken our strength at its heart!" Though he was a gentle 
man, he looked so fey and cold that those who saw him feared him. "Look to the Master 
Summoner," he said. "Though who will summon back his spirit, since he the master 
of his art is gone?" 

 He went toward his own chamber, and they all drew back to let him pass. 

 The Master Healer was sent for. He had them lay Thorion the Summoner abed 
and cover him warmly; but he brewed no herb of healing, nor did he sing any of the 
chants that aid the sick body or the troubled mind. One of his pupils was with him, 
a young boy not yet made sorcerer, but promising in the arts of healing, and he 
asked, "Master, is there nothing to be done for him?" 

 "Not on this side of the wall," said the Master Healer. Then, recalling to 
whom he spoke, he said, "He is not ill, lad; but even if this were a fever or illness 
of the body, I do not know if our craft would much avail. It seems there is no savor 
in my herbs of late; and though I say the words of our spells, there is no virtue 
in them." 

 "That is like what the Master Chanter said yesterday. He stopped in the middle 
of a song he was teaching us, and said, 'I do not know what the song means.' And 
he walked out of the room. Some of the boys laughed, but I felt as if the floor 
had sunk out from under me." 

 The Healer looked at the boys blunt, clever face, and then down at the 


Summoner's face, cold and rigid. "He will come back to us," he said. "The songs 
will not be forgotten." 

 That night the Changer went from Roke. No one saw the manner of his going. 
He slept in a room with a window looking out into a garden; the window was open 
in the morning, and he was gone. They thought he had transformed himself with his 
own skill of form-change into a bird or beast, or a mist or wind even, for no shape 
or substance was beyond his art, and so had fled from Roke, perhaps to seek for 
the Archmage. Some, knowing how the shape-changer may be caught in his own spells 
if there is any failure of skill or will, feared for him, but they said nothing 
of their fears. 

 So there were three of the Masters lost to the Council of the Wise. As the 
days passed and no news ever came of the Archmage, and the Summoner lay like one 
dead, and the Changer did not return, a chill and gloom grew in the Great House. 
The boys whispered among themselves, and some of them spoke of leaving Roke, for 
they were not being taught what they had come to learn. "Maybe," said one, "they 
were all lies from the beginning, these secret arts and powers. Of the Masters, 
only the Master Hand still does his tricks, and these, we all know, are frank 
illusion. And now the others hide or refuse to do anything, because their tricks 
have been revealed." Another, listening, said, "Well, what is wizardry? What is 
this art-magic, beyond a show of seeming? Has it ever saved a man from death, or 
given long life, even? Surely if the mages have the power they claim to have, they'd 
all live forever!" And he and the other boy fell to telling over the deaths of the 
great mages, how Morred had been killed in battle, and Nereger by the Grey Mage, 
and Erreth-Akbe by a dragon, and Gensher, the last Archmage, by mere sickness, in 
his bed, like any man. Some of the boys listened gladly, having envious hearts; 
others listened and were wretched. 

 All this time the Master Patterner stayed alone in the Grove and let none 
enter it. 

 But the Doorkeeper, though seldom seen, had not changed. He bore no shadow 
in his eyes. He smiled, and kept the doors of the Great House ready for its lord's 
return. 

 

 

 

------ 

The Dragons' Run 

------ 

 

 On the seas of the outermost West Reach, that Lord of the Island of the Wise, 
waking cramped and stiff in a small boat in a cold, bright morning, sat up and yawned. 
And after a moment, pointing north, he said to his yawning companion, "There! Two 
islands, do you see them? The southmost of the isles of the Dragons' Run." 

 "You have a hawk's eyes, lord," said Arren, peering through sleep over the 
sea and seeing nothing. 

 "Therefore I am the Sparrowhawk," the mage said; he was still cheerful, 
seeming to shrug off forethought and foreboding. "Can't you see them?" 

 "I see gulls," said Arren, after rubbing his eyes and searching all the 
blue-grey horizon before the boat. 

 The mage laughed. "Could even a hawk see gulls at twenty miles' distance?" 

 As the sun brightened above the eastern mists, the tiny wheeling flecks in 
the air that Arren watched seemed to sparkle, like gold-dust shaken in water, or 
dust-motes in a sunbeam. And then Arren realized that they were dragons. 

 As Lookfar approached the islands, Arren saw the dragons soaring and circling 
on the morning wind, and his heart leapt up with them with a joy, a joy of fulfillment, 
that was like pain. All the glory of mortality was in that flight. Their beauty 
was made up of terrible strength, utter wildness, and the grace of reason. For these 
were thinking creatures, with speech and ancient wisdom: in the patterns of their 


flight there was a fierce, willed concord. 

 Arren did not speak, but he thought: I do not care what comes after; I have 
seen the dragons on the wind of morning. 

 At times the patterns jarred, and the circles broke, and often in flight one 
dragon or another would jet from its nostrils a long streak of fire that curved 
and hung on the air a moment repeating the curve and brightness of the dragon's 
long, arching body. Seeing that, the mage said, "They are angry. They dance their 
anger on the wind." 

 And presently he said, "Now we're in the hornet's nest." For the dragons had 
seen the little sail on the waves, and first one, then another, broke from the 
whirlwind of their dancing and came stretched long and level on the air, rowing 
with great wings, straight toward the boat. 

 The mage looked at Arren, who sat at the tiller, since the waves ran rough 
and counter. The boy held it steady with a steady hand, though his eyes were on 
the beating of those wings. As if satisfied, Sparrowhawk turned again, and standing 
by the mast, let the magewind drop from the sail. He lifted up his staff and spoke 
aloud. 

 At the sound of his voice and the words of the Old Speech, some of the dragons 
wheeled in mid flight, scattering, and returned to the isles. Others halted and 
hovered, the swordlike claws of their forearms outstretched but checked. One, 
dropping low over the water, flew slowly on toward them: in two wing-strokes it 
was over the boat. The mailed belly scarcely cleared the mast. Arren saw the wrinkled, 
unarmored flesh between the inner shoulder-joint and breast, which, with the eye, 
is the dragon's only vulnerable part, unless the spear that strikes is mightily 
enchanted. The smoke that roiled from the long, toothed mouth choked him, and with 
it came a carrion stench that made him wince and retch. 

 The shadow passed. It returned, as low as before, and this time Arren felt 
the furnace-blast of breath before the smoke. He heard Sparrowhawk's voice, clear 
and fierce. The dragon passed over. Then all were gone, streaming back to the isles 
like fiery cinders on a gust of wind. 

 Arren caught his breath and wiped his forehead, which was covered with cold 
sweat. Looking at his companion, he saw his hair gone white: the dragon's breath 
had burnt and crisped the ends of the hairs. And the heavy cloth of the sail was 
scorched brown along one side. 

 "Your head is somewhat singed, lad." 

 "So is yours, lord." 

 Sparrowhawk passed his hand over his hair, surprised. "So it is!- That was 
an insolence; but I seek no quarrel with these creatures. They seem mad or bewildered. 
They did not speak. Never have I met a dragon who did not speak before it struck, 
if only to torment its prey... Now we must go forward. Do not look them in the eye, 
Arren. Turn aside your face if you must. We'll go with the world's wind; it blows 
fair from the south, and I may need my art for other things. Hold her as she goes." 

 Lookfar moved forward and soon had on her left a distant island and on her 
right the twin isles they had seen first. These rose up into low cliffs, and all 
the stark rock was whitened with the droppings of the dragons and of the little, 
black-headed terns that nested fearlessly among them. 

 The dragons had flown up high, and circled in the upper air as vultures circle. 
Not one stooped down again to the boat. Sometimes they cried out to one another, 
high and harsh across the gulfs of air, but if there were words in their crying, 
Arren could not make them out. 

 The boat rounded a short promontory, and he saw on the shore what he took 
for a moment to be a ruined fortress. It was a dragon. One black wing was bent under 
it and the other stretched out vast across the sand and into the water, so that 
the come and go of waves moved it a little to and fro in a mockery of flight. The 
long snake-body lay full length on the rock and sand. One foreleg was missing, the 
armor and flesh were torn from the great arch of the ribs, and the belly was torn 
open, so that the sand for yards about was blackened with the poisoned dragon-blood. 


Yet the creature still lived. So great a life is in dragons that only an equal power 
of wizardry can kill them swiftly. The green-gold eyes were open, and as the boat 
sailed by, the lean, huge head moved a little, and with a rattling hiss steam mixed 
with bloody spray shot from the nostrils. 

 The beach between the dying dragon and the sea's edge was tracked and scored 
by the feet and heavy bodies of his kind, and his entrails were trodden into the 
sand. 

 Neither Arren nor Sparrowhawk spoke until they were well clear of that island 
and heading across the choppy, restless channel of the Dragons' Run, full of reefs 
and pinnacles and shapes of rock, toward the northern islands of the double chain. 
Then Sparrowhawk said, "That was an evil sight," and his voice was bleak and cold. 

 "Do they... eat their own kind?" 

 "No. No more than we do. They have been driven mad. Their speech has been 
taken from them. They who spoke before men spoke, they who are older than any living 
thing, the Children of Segoy -they have been driven to the dumb terror of the beasts. 
Ah! Kalessin! where have your wings borne you? Have you lived to see your race learn 
shame?" His voice rang like struck iron, and he looked upward, searching the sky. 
But the dragons were behind, circling lower now above the rocky isles and the 
blood-stained beach, and overhead was nothing but the blue sky and the sun of noon. 

 There was then no man living who had sailed the Dragons' Run or seen it, except 
the Archmage. Twenty years before and more, he had sailed the length of it from 
east to west and back again. It was a nightmare and a marvel, to a sailor. The water 
was a maze of blue channels and green shoals, and among these, by hand and word 
and most vigilant care, he and Arren now picked their boat's way, between the rocks 
and reefs. Some of these lay low, under or half-under the wash of the waves, covered 
with anemone and barnacle and ribbony sea fern; like water-monsters, shelled or 
sinuous. Others stood up in cliff and pinnacle sheer from the sea, and these were 
arches and half-arches, carven towers, fantastic shapes of animals, boar's backs 
and serpent's heads, all huge, deformed, diffuse, as if life writhed half-conscious 
in the rock. The sea-waves beat on them with a sound like breathing, and they were 
wet with the bright, bitter spray. In one such rock from the south there was plainly 
visible the hunched shoulders and heavy, noble head of a man, stooped in pondering 
thought above the sea; but when the boat had passed it, looking back from the north, 
all man was gone from it, and the massive rocks revealed a cave in which the sea 
rose and fell making a hollow, clapping thunder. There seemed to be a word, a 
syllable, in that sound. As they sailed on, the garbling echoes lessened and this 
syllable came more clearly, so that Arren said, "Is there a voice in the cave?" 

 "The sea's voice." 

 "But it speaks a word." 

 Sparrowhawk listened; he glanced at Arren and back at the cave. "How do you 
hear it?" 

 "As saying the sound ahm." 

 "In the Old Speech that signifies the beginning, or long ago. But I hear it 
as ohb, which is a way of saying the end. Look ahead there!" he ended abruptly, 
even as Arren warned him, "Shoal water!" And, though Lookfar picked her way like 
a cat among the dangers, they were busy with the steering for some while, and slowly 
the cave forever thundering out its enigmatic word fell behind them. 

 Now the water deepened, and they came out from among the phantasmagoria of 
the rocks. Ahead of them loomed an island like a tower. Its cliffs were black and 
made up of many cylinders or great pillars pressed together, with straight edges 
and plane surfaces, rising three hundred feet sheer from the water. 

 "That is the Keep of Kalessin," said the mage. "So the dragons named it to 
me, when I was here long ago." 

 "Who is Kalessin?" 

 "The eldest..." 

 "Did he build this place?" 

 "I do not know. I don't know if it was built. Nor how old he is. I say 'he,' 


but I do not even know that... To Kalessin, Orm Embar is like a yearling kid. And 
you and I are like mayflies." He scanned the terrific palisades, and Arren looked 
up at them uneasily, thinking how a dragon might drop from that far, black rim and 
be upon them almost with its shadow. But no dragon came. They passed slowly through 
the still waters in the lee of the rock, hearing nothing but the whisper and clap 
of shadowed waves on the columns of basalt. The water here was deep, without reef 
or rock; Arren handled the boat, and Sparrowhawk stood up in the prow, searching 
the cliffs and the bright sky ahead. 

 The boat passed out at last from the shadow of the Keep of Kalessin into the 
sunlight of late afternoon. They were across the Dragons' Run. The mage lifted his 
head, like one who sees what he had looked to see, and across that great space of 
gold before them came on golden wings the dragon Orm Embar. 

 Arren heard Sparrowhawk's cry to him: Aro Kalessin? He guessed the meaning 
of that, but could make no sense of what the dragon answered. Yet hearing the Old 
Speech he felt always that he was on the point of understanding, almost 
understanding: as if it were a language he had forgotten, not one he had never known. 
In speaking it the mage's voice was much clearer than when he spoke Hardic, and 
seemed to make a kind of silence about it, as does the softest touch on a great 
bell. But the dragon's voice was like a gong, both deep and shrill, or the hissing 
thrum of cymbals. 

 Arren watched his companion stand there in the narrow prow, speaking with 
the monstrous creature that hovered above him filling half the sky; and a kind of 
rejoicing pride came into the boy's heart, to see how small a thing a man is, how 
frail and how terrible. For the dragon could have torn the man's head from his 
shoulders with one stroke of his taloned foot, he could have crushed and sunk the 
boat as a stone sinks a floating leaf, if it were only size that mattered. But 
Sparrowhawk was as dangerous as Orm Embar, and the dragon knew it. 

 The mage turned his head. "Lebannen," he said, and the boy got up and came 
forward, though he wanted to go not one step closer to those fifteen-foot jaws and 
the long, slit-pupilled, yellow-green eyes that burned upon him from the air. 

 Sparrowhawk said nothing to him, but put a hand on his shoulder, and spoke 
again to the dragon, briefly. 

 "Lebannen," said the vast voice with no passion in it. "Agni Lebannen!" 

 He looked up; the pressure of the mage's hand reminded him, and he avoided 
the gaze of the greengold eyes. 

 He could not speak the Old Speech, but he was not dumb. "I greet thee, Orm 
Embar, Lord Dragon," he said clearly, as one prince greets another. 

 Then there was a silence, and Arren's heart beat hard and labored. But 
Sparrowhawk, standing by him, smiled. 

 After that the dragon spoke again, and Sparrowhawk replied; and this seemed 
long to Arren. At last it was over, suddenly. The dragon sprang aloft with a wingbeat 
that all but heeled the boat over, and was off. Arren looked at the sun and found 
it seemed no nearer setting than before; the time had not really been long. But 
the mage's face was the color of wet ashes, and his eyes glittered as he turned 
to Arren. He sat down on the thwart. 

 "Well done, lad," he said hoarsely, "It is not easy talking to dragons." 

 Arren got them food, for they had not eaten all day; and the mage said no 
more until they had eaten and drunk. By then the sun was low to the horizon, though 
in these northern latitudes, and not long past midsummer, night came late and 
slowly. 

 "Well," he said at last, "Orm Embar has, after his fashion, told me much. 
He says that the one we seek is and is not on Selidor... It is hard for a dragon 
to speak plainly. They do not have plain minds. And even when one of them would 
speak the truth to a man, which is seldom, he does not know how truth looks to a 
man. So I asked him, 'Even as thy father Orm is on Selidor?' For as you know, there 
Orm and Erreth-Akbe died in their battle. And he answered, 'No and yes. You will 
find him on Selidor, but not on Selidor.'" Sparrowhawk paused and pondered, chewing 


on a crust of hard bread. "Maybe he meant that though the man is not on Selidor, 
yet I must go there to get to him. Maybe... 

 "I asked him then of the other dragons. He said that this man has been among 
them, having no fear of them, for though killed he returns from death in his body, 
alive. Therefore they fear him as a creature outside nature. Their fear gives his 
wizardry hold over them, and he takes the Speech of the Making from them, leaving 
them prey to their own wild nature. So they devour one another or take their own 
lives, plunging into the sea - a loathly death for the fire-serpent, the beast of 
wind and fire. Then I said, 'Where is thy lord Kalessin?' and all he would answer 
was, 'In the West,' which might mean that Kalessin has flown away to the other lands, 
which dragons say lie farther than ever ship has sailed; or it may not mean that. 

 "So then I ceased my questions, and he asked his, saying, 'I flew over Kaltuel 
returning north, and over the Toringates. On Kaltuel I saw villagers killing a baby 
on an altar stone, and on Ingat I saw a sorcerer killed by his towns folk throwing 
stones at him. Will they eat the baby, think you, Ged? Will the sorcerer come back 
from death and throw stones at his towns folk?' I thought he mocked me and was about 
to speak in anger, but he was not mocking. He said, 'The sense has gone out of things. 
There is a hole in the world and the sea is running out of it. The light is running 
out. We will be left in the dry land. There will be no more speaking and no more 
dying.' So at last I saw what he would say to me." 

 Arren did not see it, and moreover was sorely troubled. For Sparrowhawk, in 
repeating the dragon's words, had named himself by his own true name, unmistakably. 
This brought unwelcome into Arren's mind the memory of that tormented woman of 
Lorbanery crying out, "My name is Akaren!" If the powers of wizardry, and of music, 
and speech, and trust, were weakening and withering among men, if an insanity of 
fear was coming on them so that, like the dragons bereft of reason, they turned 
on each other to destroy: if all this were so, would his lord escape it? Was he 
so strong? 

 He did not look strong, sitting hunched over his supper of bread and smoked 
fish, with hair greyed and fire-singed, and slight hands, and a tired face. 

 Yet the dragon feared him. 

 "What irks you, lad?" 

 Only the truth would do, with him. 

 "My lord, you spoke your name." 

 "Oh, aye. I forgot I had not done so earlier. You will need my true name, 
if we go where we must go." He looked up, chewing, at Arren "Did you think I grew 
senile and went about babbling my name, like old bleared men past sense and shame? 
Not yet, lad!" 

 "No," said Arren, so confused that he could say nothing else. He was very 
weary; the day had been long, and full of dragons. And the way ahead grew dark. 

 "Arren," said the mage.- "No; Lebannen: where we go, there is no hiding. There 
all bear their own true names." 

 "The dead cannot be hurt," said Arren somberly. 

 "But it is not only there, not in death only, that men take their names. Those 
who can be most hurt, the most vulnerable: those who have given love and do not 
take it back, they speak each other's names. The faithful-hearted, the givers of 
life... You are worn out, lad. Lie down and sleep. There's nothing to do now but 
keep the course all night. And by morning we shall see the last island of the world." 

 In his voice was an insuperable gentleness. Arren curled up in the prow, and 
sleep began to come into him at once. He heard the mage begin a soft, almost 
whispering chant, not in the Hardic tongue but in the words of the Making; and as 
he began to understand at last and to remember what the words meant, just before 
he understood them, he fell fast asleep. 

 Silently the mage stowed away their bread and meat, looked to the lines, made 
all trim in the boat, and then, taking the guide-line of the sail in hand and sitting 
down on the after-thwart, he set the magewind strong in the sail. Tireless, Lookfar 
sped north, an arrow over the sea. 


 He looked down at Arren. The boy's sleeping face was lit red-gold by the long 
sunset, the rough hair was wind-stirred. The soft, easy, princely look of the boy 
who had sat by the fountain of the Great House a few months since was gone; this 
was a thinner face, harder, and much stronger. But it was not less beautiful. 

 "I have found none to follow in my way," Ged the Archmage said aloud to the 
sleeping boy or to the empty wind. "None but thee. And thou must go thy way, not 
mine. Yet will thy kingship be, in part, my own. For I knew thee first. I knew thee 
flrst! They will praise me more for that in afterdays than for any thing I did of 
magery... If there will be after-days. For first we two must stand upon the 
balance-point, the very fulcrum of the world. And if I fall, you fall, and all the 
rest... For a while, for a while. No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there 
are stars... Oh, but I should like to see thee crowned in Havnor, and the sunlight 
shining on the Tower of the Sword and on the Ring we brought for thee from Atuan, 
from the dark tombs, Tenar and I, before ever thou wast born!" 

 He laughed then, and turning to face the north, he said to himself in the 
common tongue, "A goatherd to set the heir of Morred on his throne! Will I never 
learn?" 

 Presently, as he sat with the guide-rope in his hand and watched the full 
sail strain reddened in the last light of the west, he spoke again softly. "Not 
In Havnor would I be and not in Roke. It is time to be done with power. To drop 
the old toys and go on. It is time that I went home. I would see Tenar. I would 
see Ogion and speak with him before he dies, in the house on the cliffs of Re Albi. 
I crave to walk on the mountain, the mountain of Gont, in the forests, in the autumn 
when the leaves are bright. There is no kingdom like the forests. It is time I went 
there, went in silence, went alone. And maybe there I would learn at last what no 
act or art or power can teach me, what I have never learned." 

 The whole west blazed up in a fury and glory of red, so that the sea was crimson 
and the sail above it bright as blood; and then the night came quietly on. All that 
night long the boy slept and the man waked, gazing forward steadily into the dark. 
There were no stars. 

 

 

 

------ 

Selidor 

------ 

 

 Waking in the morning Arren saw before the boat, dim and low along the blue 
west, the shores of Selidor. 

 In the Hall in Berila were old maps that had been made in the days of the 
Kings, when traders and explorers had sailed from the Inner Lands and the Reaches 
had been better known. A great map of the North and West was laid in mosaic on two 
walls of the Prince's throne-room, with the isle of Enlad in gold and grey above 
the throne. Arren saw it in his mind's eye as he had seen it a thousand times in 
boyhood. North of Enlad was Osskil, and west of it Ebosskil, and south of that Semel 
and Paln. There the Inner Lands ended, and there was nothing but the pale blue-green 
mosaic of the empty sea, set here and there with a tiny dolphin or a whale. Then 
at last, after the corner where the north wall met the west wall, there was Narveduen, 
and beyond it three lesser islands. And then the empty sea again, on and on; until 
the very edge of the wall and the end of the map, and there was Selidor, and beyond 
it, nothing. 

 He could recall it vividly, the curving shape of it, with a great bay in the 
heart of it, opening narrowly to the east. They had not come so far north as that, 
but were steering now for a deep cove in the southernmost cape of the island, and 
there, while the sun was still low in the haze of morning, they came to land. 

 So ended their great run from the Roads of Balatran to the Western Isle. The 
stillness of the earth was strange to them when they had beached Lookfar and walked 


after so long on solid ground. 

 Ged climbed a low dune, grass-crowned, the crest of it leaning out over the 
steep slope, bound into cornices by the tough roots of the grass. When he reached 
the summit he stood still, looking west and north. Arren stopped at the boat to 
put on his shoes, which he had not worn for many days, and he took his sword out 
of the gear-box and buckled it on, this time with no questions in his mind as to 
whether or not he should do so. Then he climbed up beside Ged to look at the land. 

 The dunes ran inland, low and grassy, for half a mile or so, and then there 
were lagoons, thick with sedge and salt-reeds, and beyond those, low hills lay 
yellow-brown and empty to the end of sight. Beautiful and desolate was Selidor. 
Nowhere on it was there any mark of man, his work or habitation. There were no beasts 
to be seen, and the reedfilled lakes bore no flocks of gulls or wild geese or any 
bird. 

 They descended the inland side of the dune, and the slope of sand cut off 
the noise of the breakers and the sound of the wind, so that it became still. 

 Between the outmost dune and the next was a dell of clean sand, sheltered, 
the morning sun shining warm on its western slope. "Lebannen," the mage said, for 
he used Arren's true name now, "I could not sleep last night, and now I must. Stay 
with me and keep watch." He lay down in the sunlight, for the shade was cold; put 
his arm over his eyes; sighed, and slept. Arren sat down beside him. He could see 
nothing but the white slopes of the dell, and the dune-grass bowing at the top 
against the misty blue of the sky, and the yellow sun. There was no sound except 
the muted murmur of the surf, and sometimes the wind gusting moved the particles 
of sand a little with a faint whispering. 

 Arren saw what might have been an eagle flying very high, but it was not an 
eagle. It circled and stooped, and down it came with that thunder and shrill whistle 
of outspread golden wings. It alighted on huge talons on the summit of the dune. 
Against the sun the great head was black, with fiery glints. 

 The dragon crawled a little way down the slope and spoke. "Agni Lebannen," 
it said. 

 Standing between it and Ged, Arren answered: "Orm Embar." And he held his 
bare sword in his hand. 

 It did not feel heavy now. The smooth, worn hilt was comfortable in his hand; 
it fitted. The blade had come lightly, eagerly, from the sheath. The power of it, 
the age of it, were on his side, for he knew now what use to make of it. It was 
his sword. 

 The dragon spoke again, but Arren could not understand. He glanced back at 
his sleeping companion, whom all the rush and thunder had not awakened, and said 
to the dragon, "My lord is weary; he sleeps." 

 At that Orm Embar crawled and coiled on down to the bottom of the dell. He 
was heavy on the ground, not lithe and free as when he flew, but there was a sinister 
grace in the slow placing of his great, taloned feet and the curving of his thorny 
tail. Once there he drew his legs beneath him, lifted up his huge head, and was 
still: like a dragon carved on a warrior's helm. Arren was aware of his yellow eye, 
not ten feet away, and of the faint reek of burning that hung about him. This was 
no carrion stink; dry and metallic, it accorded with the faint odors of the sea 
and the salt sand, a clean, wild smell. 

 The sun rising higher struck the flanks of Orm Embar, and he burnt like a 
dragon made of iron and gold. 

 Still Ged slept, relaxed, taking no more notice of the dragon than a sleeping 
farmer of his hound. 

 So an hour passed, and Arren, starting, found the mage had sat up beside him. 

 "Have you got so used to dragons that you fall asleep between their paws?" 
said Ged, and laughed, yawning. Then, rising, he spoke to Orm Embar in the dragons' 
speech. 

 Before Orm Embar answered, he too yawned =perhaps in sleepiness, perhaps in 
rivalry- and that was a sight that few have lived to remember: the rows of 


yellow-white teeth as long and sharp as swords, the forked, red, fiery tongue twice 
the length of a man's body, the fuming cavern of the throat. 

 Orm Embar spoke, and Ged was about to answer, when both turned to look at 
Arren. They had heard, clear in the silence, the hollow whisper of steel on sheath. 
Arren was looking up at the lip of the dune behind the mage's head, and his sword 
was ready in his hand. 

 There stood, bright lit by sunlight, the faint wind stirring his garments 
slightly, a man. He stood still as a carven figure except for that flutter of the 
hem and hood of his light cloak. His hair was long and black, falling in a mass 
of glossy curls; he was broad-shouldered and tall, a strong, comely man. His eyes 
seemed to look out over them, at the sea. He smiled. 

 "Orm Embar I know," he said. "And you also I know, though you have grown old 
since I last saw you, Sparrowhawk. You are Archmage now, they tell me. You have 
grown great, as well as old. And you have a young servant with you: a prentice mage, 
no doubt, one of those who learn wisdom on the Isle of the Wise. What do you two 
here, so far from Roke and the invulnerable walls that protect the Masters from 
all harm?" 

 "There is a breach in greater walls than those," said Ged, clasping both hands 
on his staff and looking up at the man. "But will you not come to us in the flesh, 
so that we may greet one whom we have long sought?" 

 "In the flesh?" said the man, and smiled again. "Is mere flesh, body, 
butcher's meat, of such account between two mages? No, let us meet mind to mind, 
Archmage." 

 "That, I think, we cannot do. Lad, put up your sword. It is but a sending, 
an appearance, no true man. As well draw blade against the wind. In Havnor, when 
your hair was white, you were called Cob. But that was only a use-name. How shall 
we call you when we meet you?" 

 "You will call me Lord," said the tall figure on the dune's edge. 

 "Aye, and what else?" 

 "King and Master." 

 At that Orm Embar hissed, a loud and hideous sound, and his great eyes gleamed; 
yet he turned his head away from the man, and sank crouching in his tracks, as if 
he could not move. 

 "And where shall we come to you and when?" 

 "In my domain and at my pleasure." 

 "Very well," said Ged, and lifting up his staff moved it a little toward the 
tall man- and the man was gone, like a candleflame blown out. 

 Arren stared, and the dragon rose up mightily on his four crooked legs, his 
mail clanking and the lips writhing back from his teeth. But the mage leaned on 
his staff again. 

 "It was only a sending. A presentment or image of the man. It can speak and 
hear, but there's no power in it, save what our fear may lend it. Nor is it even 
true in seeming, unless the sender so wishes. We have not seen what he now looks 
like, I guess." 

 "Is he near, do you think?" 

 "Sendings do not cross water. He is on Selidor. But Selidor is a great island: 
broader than Roke or Gont and near as long as Enlad. We may seek him long." 

 Then the dragon spoke. Ged listened and turned to Arren. "Thus says the Lord 
of Selidor: 'I have come back to my own land, nor will I leave it. I will find the 
Unmaker and bring you to him, that together we may abolish him: And have I not said 
that what a dragon hunts, he finds?" 

 Thereupon Ged went down on one knee before the great creature, as a liegeman 
kneels before a king, and thanked him in his own tongue. The breath of the dragon, 
so close, was hot on his bowed head. 

 Orm Embar dragged his scaly weight up the dune once more, beat his wings, 
and took the air. 

 Ged brushed the sand from his clothes and said to Arren, "Now you have seen 


me kneel. And maybe you'll see me kneel once more, before the end." 

 Arren did not ask what he meant; in their long companionship he had learned 
that there was reason in the mage's reserve. Yet it seemed to him that there was 
evil omen in the words. 

 They crossed over the dune to the beach once more to make sure the boat lay 
high above the reach of tide or storm, and to take from her cloaks for the night 
and what food they had left. Ged paused a minute by the slender prow which had borne 
him over strange seas so long, so far; he laid his hand on it, but he set no spell 
and said no word. Then they struck inland, northward, once again, toward the hills. 

 They walked all day, and at evening camped by a stream that wound down toward 
the reed-choked lakes and marshes. Though it was full summer the wind blew chill, 
coming from the west, from the endless, landless reaches of the open sea. A mist 
veiled the sky, and no stars shone above the hills on which no hearth-fire or 
window-light had ever gleamed. 

 In the darkness Arren woke. Their small fire was dead, but a westering moon 
lit the land with a grey, misty light. In the stream-valley and on the hillside 
about it stood a great multitude of people, all still, all silent, their faces turned 
toward Ged and Arren. Their eyes caught no light of the moon. 

 Arren dared not speak, but he put his hand on Ged's arm. The mage stirred 
and sat up, saying, "What's the matter?" He followed Arren's gaze and saw the silent 
people. 

 They were all clothed darkly, men and women alike. Their faces could not be 
clearly seen in the faint light, but it seemed to Arren that among those who stood 
nearest them in the valley, across the little stream, there were some whom he knew, 
though he could not say their names. 

 Ged stood up, the cloak falling from him. His face and hair and shirt shone 
silvery pale, as if the moonlight gathered itself to him. He held out his arm in 
a wide gesture and said aloud, "O you who have lived, go free! I break the bond 
that holds you: Anvassa mane harw pennodathe!" 

 For a moment they stood still, the multitude of silent people. They turned 
away slowly, seeming to walk into the grey darkness, and were gone. 

 Ged sat down. He drew a deep breath. He looked at Arren and put his hand on 
the boy's shoulder, and his touch was warm and firm. "There's nothing to fear, 
Lebannen," he said gently, mockingly. "They were only the dead." 

 Arren nodded, though his teeth were chattering and he felt cold to his very 
bones. "How did," he began, but his jaw and lips would not obey him yet. 

 Ged understood him. "They came at his summoning. This is what he promises: 
eternal life. At his word they may return. At his bidding they must walk upon the 
hills of life, though they cannot stir a blade of grass." 

 "Is he- is he then dead too?" 

 Ged shook his head, brooding. "The dead cannot summon the dead back into the 
world. No, he has the powers of a living man; and more... But if any thought to 
follow him, he tricked them. He keeps his power for himself. He plays King of the 
Dead; and not only of the dead... But they were only shadows." 

 "I don't know why I fear them," Arren said with shame. 

 "You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible 
and must be feared," the mage said. He laid new wood on the fire and blew on the 
small coals under the ashes. A little flare of brightness bloomed on the twigs of 
brushwood, a grateful light to Arren. "And life also is a terrible thing," Ged said, 
"and must be feared and praised." 

 They both sat back, wrapping their cloaks close about them. They were silent 
a while. Then Ged spoke very gravely. "Lebannen, how long he may tease us here with 
sendings and with shadows, I do not know. But you know where he will go at last." 

 "Into the dark land." 

 "Aye. Among them." 

 "I have seen them now. I will go with you." 

 "Is it faith in me that moves you? You may trust my love, but do not trust 


my strength. For I think I have met my match." 

 "I will go with you." 

 "But if I am defeated, if my power or my life is spent, I cannot guide you 
back; you cannot return alone." 

 "I will return with you." 

 At that Ged said, "You enter your manhood at the gate of death." And then 
he said that word or name by which the dragon had twice called Arren, speaking it 
very low: "Agni- Agni Lebannen." 

 After that they spoke no more, and presently sleep came back into them, and 
they lay down by their small and briefly burning fire. 

 The next morning they walked on, going north and west; this was Arren's 
decision, not Ged's, who said, "Choose us our way, lad; the ways are all alike to 
me." They made no haste, for they had no goal, waiting for some sign from Orm Embar. 
They followed the lowest, outmost range of hills, mostly within sight of the ocean. 
The grass was dry and short, blowing and blowing forever in the wind. The hills 
rose up golden and forlorn upon their right, and on their left lay the salt marshes 
and the western sea. Once they saw swans flying, far away in the south. No other 
breathing creature did they see all that day. A kind of weariness of dread, of 
waiting for the worst, grew in Arren all day long. Impatience and a dull anger rose 
in him. He said, after hours of silence, "This land is as dead as the land of death 
itself!" 

 "Do not say that," the mage said sharply. He strode on a while and then went 
on, in a changed voice, "Look at this land; look about you. This is your kingdom, 
the kingdom of life. This is your immortality. Look at the hills, the mortal hills. 
They do not endure forever. The hills with the living grass on them, and the streams 
of water running... In all the world, in all the worlds, in all the immensity of 
time, there is no other like each of those streams, rising cold out of the earth 
where no eye sees it, running through the sunlight and the darkness to the sea. 
Deep are the springs of being, deeper than life, than death..." 

 He stopped, but in his eyes as he looked at Arren and at the sunlit hills 
there was a great, wordless, grieving love. And Arren saw that, and seeing it saw 
him, saw him for the first time whole, as he was. 

 "I cannot say what I mean," Ged said unhappily. 

 But Arren thought of that first hour in the Fountain Court, of the man who 
had knelt by the running water of the fountain; and joy, as clear as that remembered 
water, welled up in him. He looked at his companion and said, "I have given my love 
to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?" 

 "Aye, lad," said Ged, gently and with pain. 

 They went on together in silence. But Arren saw the world now with his 
companion's eyes and saw the living splendor that was revealed about them in the 
silent, desolate land, as if by a power of enchantment surpassing any other, in 
every blade of the windbowed grass, every shadow, every stone. So when one stands 
in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it 
all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see 
it again. 

 As evening came on serried lines of clouds rose from the west, borne on great 
winds from the sea, and burnt fiery before the sun, reddening it as it sank. As 
he gathered brushwood for their fire in a creek-valley, in that red light, Arren 
glanced up and saw a man standing not ten feet from him. The man's face looked vague 
and strange, but Arren knew him, the Dyer of Lorbanery, Sopli, who was dead. 

 Behind him stood others, all with sad, staring faces. They seemed to speak, 
but Arren could not hear their words, only a kind of whispering blown away by the 
west wind. Some of them came toward him slowly. 

 He stood and looked at them, and again at Sopli; and then he turned his back 
on them, stooped, and picked up one more stick of brushwood, though his hands shook. 
He added it to his load, and picked up another, and one more. Then he straightened 
and looked back. There was no one in the valley, only the red light burning on the 


grass. He returned to Ged and set down his load of firewood, but he said nothing 
of what he had seen. 

 All that night, in the misty darkness of that land empty of living souls, 
when he woke from fitful sleep he heard about him the whispering of the souls of 
the dead. He steadied his will, and did not listen, and slept again. 

 Both he and Ged woke late, when the sun, already a hands' breadth above the 
hills, broke free at last from fog and brightened the cold land. As they ate their 
small morning meal the dragon came, wheeling above them in the air. Fire shot from 
his jaws, and smoke and sparks from his red nostrils; his teeth gleamed like blades 
of ivory in that lurid glare. But he said nothing, though Ged hailed him, crying 
in his language, "Hast found him, Orm Embar?" 

 The dragon threw back his head and arched his body strangely, raking the wind 
with his razor talons. Then he set off flying fast to the west, looking back at 
them as he went. 

 Ged gripped his staff and struck it on the ground. "He cannot speak," he said. 
"He cannot speak! The words of the Making are taken from him, and he is left like 
an adder, like a tongueless worm, his wisdom dumb. Yet he can lead, and we can 
follow!" Swinging up their light packs on their backs, they strode westward across 
the hills, as Orm Embar had flown. 

 Eight miles or more they went, not slackening that first, swift, steady pace. 
Now the sea lay on either hand, and they walked on a long, falling ridge-back that 
ran down at last through dry reeds and winding creek-beds to an outcurving beach 
of sand, colored like ivory. This was the westernmost cape of all the lands, the 
end of earth. 

 Orm Embar crouched on that ivory sand, his head low like an angry cat's and 
his breath coming in gasps of fire. Some way before him, between him and the long, 
low breakers of the sea, stood a thing like a hut or shelter, white, as if built 
of long-beached driftwood. But there was no driftwood on this shore which faced 
no other land. As they came closer Arren saw that the ramshackle walls were built 
up of great bones: whales' bones, he thought at first, and then saw the white 
triangles edged like knives, and knew they were the bones of a dragon. 

 They came to the place. Sunlight on the sea glittered through crevices between 
the bones. The lintel of the doorway was a thighbone longer than a man. On it stood 
a human skull, staring with hollow eyes at the hills of Selidor. 

 They stopped there, and as they looked up at the skull a man came out of the 
doorway under it. He wore an armor of gilt bronze of ancient fashion; it was rent 
as if by hatchet blows, and the jeweled scabbard of his sword was empty. His face 
was stern, with arched, black brows and narrow nose; his eyes were dark, keen, and 
sorrowful. There were wounds on his arms and in his throat and side; they bled no 
longer, but they were mortal wounds. He stood erect and still, and looked at them. 

 Ged took one step toward him. They were somewhat alike, thus face to face. 

 "Thou art Erreth-Akbe," Ged said. The other gazed at him steadily and nodded 
once, but did not speak. 

 "Even thou, even thou must do his bidding." Rage was in Ged's voice. "O my 
lord, and best and bravest of us all, rest in thy honor and in death!" And raising 
his hands, Ged brought them down in a great gesture, saying again those words he 
had spoken to the multitudes of the dead. His hands left behind on the air a moment 
a broad, bright track. When it was gone, the armored man was gone, and only the 
sun dazzled on the sand where he had stood. 

 Ged struck at the house of bones with his staff, and it fell and vanished 
away. Nothing of it was left but one great rib-bone that stuck up out of the sand. 

 He turned to Orm Embar. "Is it here, Orm Embar? Is this the place?" 

 The dragon opened his mouth and made a huge, gasping hiss. 

 "Here on the last shore of the world. That is well!" Then holding his black 
yew staff in his left hand, Ged opened his arms in the gesture of invocation, and 
spoke. Though he spoke in the language of the Making, yet Arren understood, at last, 
as all who hear that invocation must understand, for it has power over all: "Now 


do I summon you and here, my enemy, before my eyes and in the flesh, and bind you 
by the word that will not be spoken till time's end, to come!" 

 But where the name of him summoned should have been spoken, Ged said only: 
My enemy. 

 A silence followed, as if the sound of the sea had faded. It seemed to Arren 
that the sun failed and dimmed, though it stood high in a clear sky. A darkness 
came over the beach, as though one looked through smoked glass; directly before 
Ged it grew very dark, and it was hard to see what was there. It was as if nothing 
was there, nothing the light could fall on, a formlessness. 

 Out of it came a man, suddenly. It was the same man they had seen upon the 
dune, black-haired and long-armed, lithe and tall. He held now a long rod or blade 
of steel, graven all down its length with runes, and he tilted this toward Ged as 
he faced him. But there was something strange in the look of his eyes, as if they 
were sun-dazzled and could not see. 

 "I come," he said, "at my own choosing, in my own way. You cannot summon me, 
Archmage. I am no shadow. I am alive. I only am alive! You think you are, but you 
are dying, dying. Do you know what this is I hold? It is the staff of the Grey Mage, 
he who silenced Nereger; the Master of my art. But I am the Master now. And I have 
had enough of playing games with you." With that he suddenly reached out the steel 
blade to touch Ged, who stood as if he could not move and could not speak. Arren 
stood a pace behind him, and all his will was to move, but he could not stir, he 
could not even put his hand on his sword-hilt, and his voice was stopped in his 
throat. 

 But over Ged and Arren, over their heads, vast and fiery, the great body of 
the dragon came in one writhing leap and plunged down full-force upon the other, 
so that the charmed steel blade entered into the dragon's mailed breast to its full 
length: but the man was borne down under his weight and crushed and burnt. 

 Rising up again from the sand, arching his back and beating his vaned wings, 
Orm Embar vomited out gouts of fire and screamed. He tried to fly, but he could 
not fly. Malign and cold, the metal lay in his heart. He crouched, and the blood 
ran black and poisonous, steaming, from his mouth, and the fire died in his nostrils 
till they became like pits of ash. He laid down his great head on the sand. 

 So died Orm Embar where his forefather Orm died, on the bones of Orm buried 
in the sand. 

 But where Orm had struck his enemy to earth, there lay something ugly and 
shriveled, like the body of a big spider dried up in its web. It had been burned 
by the dragon's breath and crushed by his taloned feet. Yet, as Arren watched, it 
moved. It crawled away a little from the dragon. 

 The face lifted up toward them. There was no comeliness left in it, only ruin, 
old age that had outlived old age. The mouth was withered. The sockets of the eyes 
were empty and had long been empty. So Ged and Arren saw at last the living face 
of their enemy. 

 It turned away. The burnt, blackened arms reached out, and a darkness gathered 
into them, that same shapeless darkness that swelled and dimmed the sunlight. 
Between the arms of the Unmaker it was like an archway or a gate, though dim and 
without outline; and through it was neither pale sand nor ocean, but a long slope 
of darkness going down into the dark. 

 There the crushed, crawling figure went, and when it came into the darkness 
it seemed suddenly to rise up and move swiftly, and it was gone. 

 "Come, Lebannen," said Ged, laying his right hand on the boy's arm, and they 
went forward into the dry land. 

 

 

 

 

------ 

The Dry Land 


------ 

 

 The yew-wood staff in the mage's hand shone in the dull, lowering darkness 
with a silver gleam. Another slight glimmering movement caught Arren's eye: a 
flicker of light along the blade of the sword he held naked in his band. As the 
dragon's act and death had broken the binding spell, he had drawn his sword, there 
on the beach of Selidor. And here, though he was no more than a shadow, he was a 
living shadow, and bore the shadow of his sword. 

 There was no other brightness anywhere. It was like a late twilight under 
clouds at the end of November, a dour, chill, dull air in which one could see, but 
not clearly and not far. Arren knew the place, the moors and barrens of his hopeless 
dreams; but it seemed to him that he was farther, immensely farther, than he had 
ever been in dream. He could make out nothing distinctly, except that he and his 
companion stood on the slope of a hill, and before them was a low wall of stones, 
no higher than a man's knee. 

 Ged still kept his right hand on Arren's arm. He moved forward now, and Arren 
went with him; they stepped over the wall of stones. 

 Formless, the long slope fell away before them, descending into the dark. 

 But overhead, where Arren had thought to see a heavy overcast of clouds, the 
sky was black, and there were stars. He looked at them, and it seemed as if his 
heart shrank small and cold within him. They were no stars that he had ever seen. 
Unmoving they shone, unwinking. They were those stars that do not rise or set, nor 
are they ever hidden by any cloud, nor does any sunrise dim them. Still and small 
they shine on the dry land. 

 Ged set off walking down the far side of the hill of being, and pace by pace 
Arren went with him. There was terror in him, and yet so resolved was his heart 
and so intent his will that the fear did not rule him, nor was he even very clearly 
aware of it. It was only as if something deep within him grieved, like an animal 
shut up in a room and chained. 

 It seemed that they walked down that hill-slope for a long way, but perhaps 
it was a short way; for there was no passing of time there, where no wind blew and 
the stars did not move. They came then into the streets of one of the cities that 
are there, and Arren saw the houses with windows that are never lit, and in certain 
doorways standing, with quiet faces and empty hands, the dead. 

 The marketplaces were all empty. There was no buying and selling there, no 
gaining and spending. Nothing was used; nothing was made. Ged and Arren went through 
the narrow streets alone, though a few times they saw a figure at the turning of 
another way, distant and hardly to be seen in the gloom. At sight of the first of 
these, Arren started and raised his sword to point, but Ged shook his head and went 
on. Arren saw then that the figure was a woman who moved slowly, not fleeing from 
them. 

 All those whom they saw -not many, for the dead are many, but that land is 
large- stood still, or moved slowly and with no purpose. None of them bore wounds, 
as had the semblance of Erreth-Akbe summoned into daylight at the place of his death. 
No marks of illness were on them. They were whole and healed. They were healed of 
pain and of life. They were not loathesome as Arren had feared they would be, not 
frightening in the way he had thought they would be. Quiet were their faces, freed 
from anger and desire, and there was in their shadowed eyes no hope. 

 Instead of fear, then, great pity rose up in Arren, and if fear underlay it, 
it was not for himself, but for all people. For he saw the mother and child who 
had died together, and they were in the dark land together; but the child did not 
run, nor did it cry, and the mother did not hold it or ever look at it. And those 
who had died for love passed each other in the streets. 

 The potter's wheel was still, the loom empty, the stove cold. No voice ever 
sang. 

 The dark streets between dark houses led on and on, and they passed through 
them. The sound of their feet was the only sound. It was cold. Arren had not noticed 


that cold at first, but it crept into his spirit, which was, here, also his flesh. 
He felt very weary. They must have come a long way. Why go on? he thought, and his 
steps lagged a little. 

 Ged stopped suddenly, turning to face a man who stood at the crossing of two 
streets. He was slender and tall, with a face that Arren thought he had seen, though 
he could not remember where. Ged spoke to him, and no other voice had broken the 
silence since they stepped across the wall of stones: "O Thorion, my friend, how 
come you here!" 

 And he put out his hands to the Summoner of Roke. 

 Thorion made no answering gesture. He stood still, and his face was still; 
but the silvery light on Ged's staff struck deep in his enshadowed eyes, making 
a little light there or meeting it. Ged took the hand he did not offer and said 
again, "What do you here, Thorion? You are not of this kingdom yet. Go back!" 

 "I followed the undying one. I lost my way." The Summoner's voice was soft 
and dull, like that of a man who speaks in sleep. 

 "Upward: toward the wall," said Ged, pointing the way he and Arren had come, 
the long, dark, descending street. At that there was a tremor in Thorion's face, 
as if some hope had entered into him like a sword, intolerable. 

 "I cannot find the way," he said. "My lord, I cannot find the way." 

 "Maybe thou shalt," Ged said, and embraced him, and then went forward. Thorion 
stood still at the crossroads, behind him. 

 As they went on, it seemed to Arren that in this timeless dusk there was, 
in truth, neither forward nor backward, neither east nor west, no way to go. Was 
there a way out? He thought how they had come down the hill, always descending, 
no matter how they turned; and still in the dark city the streets went downward, 
so that to return to the wall of stones they need only climb, and at the hill's 
top they would find it. But they did not turn. Side by side, they went on. Did he 
follow Ged? Or did he lead him? 

 They came out of the city. The country of the innumerable dead was empty. 
No tree or thorn or blade of grass grew in the stony earth under the unsetting stars. 
There was no horizon, for the eye could not see so far into the gloom; but 
ahead of them the small, still stars were absent from the sky over a long space 
above the ground, and this starless space was jagged and sloped like a chain of 
mountains. As they went on, the shapes were more distinct: high peaks, weathered 
by no wind or rain. There was no snow on them to gleam in starlight. They were black. 
The sight of them struck desolation into Arren's heart. He looked away from them. 
But he knew them; he recognized them; his eyes were drawn back to them. Each time 
he looked at those peaks he felt a cold weight in his breast, and his nerve came 
near to failing. Still he walked on, always downward, for the land fell away, 
descending toward the mountains' feet. At last he said, "My lord, what are..." He 
pointed at the mountains, for he could not go on speaking; his throat was dry. 

 "They border on the world of light," Ged answered, "even as does the wall 
of stones. They have no name but Pain. There is a road across them. It is forbidden 
to the dead. It is not long. But it is a bitter road." 

 "I am thirsty," Arren said, and his companion answered, "Here they drink 
dust." 

 They went on. 

 It seemed to Arren that his companion's gait had slowed somewhat, and 
sometimes he hesitated. He himself felt no more hesitation, though the weariness 
had not ceased to grow in him. They must go down; they must go on. They went on. 

 Sometimes they passed through other towns of the dead, where the dark roofs 
made angles against the stars, which stood forever in the same place above them. 
After the towns was the empty land again, where nothing grew. As soon as they had 
come out of a town, it was lost in the darkness. Nothing could be seen, before or 
behind, except the mountains that grew ever nearer, towering before them. To their 
right the formless slope fell away as it had done, how long ago? when they crossed 
the wall of stones. "What lies that way?" Arren murmured to Ged, for he craved the 


sound of speech, but the mage shook his head: "I do not know. It may be a way without 
an end." 

 In the direction they went, the slope seemed to be growing less and always 
less. The ground under their feet gritted harshly, like lava-dust. Still they went 
on, and now Arren never thought of returning or of how they might return. Nor did 
he think of stopping, though he was very weary. Once he tried to lighten the numb 
darkness and weariness and horror within him by thinking of his home; but he could 
not remember what sunlight looked like or his mother's face. There was nothing to 
do but to go on. And he went on. 

 He felt the ground level under his feet; and beside him Ged hesitated. Then 
he too stopped. The long descent was over; this was the end; there was no way further, 
no need to go on. 

 They were in the valley directly under the Mountains of Pain. There were rocks 
underfoot and boulders about them, rough to the touch like scoria. It was as if 
this narrow valley might be the dry bed of a river of water that had once run here 
or the course of a river of fire, long since cold, from the volcanoes that reared 
their black, unmerciful peaks above. 

 He stood still, there in the narrow valley in the dark, and Ged stood still 
beside him. They stood like the aimless dead, gazing at nothing, silent. Arren 
thought, with a little dread but not much, "We have come too far." 

 It did not seem to matter much. 

 Speaking his thought, Ged said, "We have come too far to turn back." His voice 
was soft, but the ring of it was not wholly muted by the great, gloomy hollowness 
around them, and at the sound of it Arren roused a little. Had they not come here 
to meet the one they sought? 

 A voice in the darkness said, "You have come too far." 

 Arren answered it, saying, "Only too far is far enough." 

 "You have come to the Dry River," said the voice. "You cannot go back to the 
wall of stones. You cannot go back to life." 

 

 "Not that way," said Ged, speaking into the darkness. Arren could hardly see 
him, though they stood side by side, for the mountains under which they stood cut 
out half the starlight, and it seemed as if the current of the Dry River were darkness 
itself. "But we would learn your way." 

 There was no answer. 

 "We meet as equals here. If you are blind, Cob, yet we are in the dark." 

 There was no answer. 

 "We cannot hurt you here; we cannot kill you. What is there to fear?" 

 "I have no fear," said the voice in the darkness. Then slowly, glimmering 
a little as with that light that sometimes clung to Ged's staff, the man appeared, 
standing some way upstream from Ged and Arren, among the great, dim masses of the 
boulders. He was tall, broad-shouldered and longarmed, like that figure which had 
appeared to them on the dune and on the beach of Selidor, but older; the hair was 
white and thickly matted over the high forehead. So he appeared in the spirit, in 
the kingdom of death, not burnt by the dragon's fire, not maimed; but not whole. 
The sockets of his eyes were empty. 

 "I have no fear," he said. "What should a dead man fear?" He laughed. The 
sound of laughter rang so false and uncanny, there in that narrow, stony valley 
under the mountains, that Arren's breath failed him for a moment. But he gripped 
his sword and listened. 

 "I do not know what a dead man should fear," Ged answered. "Surely not death? 
Yet it seems you fear it. Even though you have found a way to escape from it." 

 "I have. I live: my body lives." 

 "Not well," the mage said dryly. "Illusion might hide age; but Orm Embar was 
not gentle with that body." 

 "I can mend it. I know secrets of healing and of youth, no mere illusions. 
What do you take me for? Because you are called Archmage, do you take me for a village 


sorcerer? I who alone among all mages found the Way of Immortality, which no other 
ever found!" 

 "Maybe we did not seek it," said Ged. 

 "You sought it. All of you. You sought it and could not find it, and so made 
wise words about acceptance and balance and the equilibrium of life and death. But 
they were words -lies to cover your failure- to cover your fear of death! What man 
would not live forever, if he could? And I can. I am immortal. I did what you could 
not do and therefore I am your master; and you know it. Would you know how I did 
it, Archmage?" 

 "I would." 

 Cob came a step closer. Arren noticed that, though the man had no eyes, his 
manner was not quite that of the stoneblind; he seemed to know exactly where Ged 
and Arren stood and to be aware of both of them, though he never turned his head 
to Arren. Some wizardly second-sight he might have, such as that hearing and seeing 
that sendings and presentments had: something that gave him an awareness, though 
it might not be true sight. 

 "I was in Paln," he said to Ged, "after you, in your pride, thought you had 
humbled me and taught me a lesson. Oh, a lesson you taught me, indeed, but not the 
one you meant to teach! There I said to myself: I have seen death now, and I will 
not accept it. Let all stupid nature go its stupid course, but I am a man, better 
than nature, above nature. I will not go that way, I will not cease to be myself! 
And so determined, I took the Pelnish Lore again, but found only hints and 
smatterings of what I needed. So I rewove it and remade it, and made a spell- the 
greatest spell that has ever been made. The greatest and the last!" 

 "In working that spell, you died." 

 "Yes! I died. I had the courage to die, to find what you cowards could never 
find - the way back from death. I opened the door that had been shut since the 
beginning of time. And now I come freely to this place and freely return to the 
world of the living. Alone of all men in all time I am Lord of the Two Lands. And 
the door I opened is open not only here, but in the minds of the living, in the 
depths and unknown places of their being, where we are all one in the darkness. 
They know it, and they come to me. And the dead too must come to me, all of them, 
for I have not lost the magery of the living: they must climb over the wall of stones 
when I bid them, all the souls, the lords, the mages, the proud women; back and 
forth from life to death, at my command. All must come to me, the living and the 
dead, I who died and live!" 

 "Where do they come to you, Cob? Where is it that you are?" 

 "Between the worlds." 

 "But that is neither life nor death. What is life, Cob?" 

 "Power." 

 "What is love?" 

 "Power," the blind man repeated heavily, hunching up his shoulders. 

 "What is light?" 

 "Darkness!" 

 "What is your name?" 

 "I have none." 

 "All in this land bear their true name." 

 "Tell me yours, then!" 

 "I am named Ged. And you?" 

 The blind man hesitated, and said, "Cob." 

 "That was your use-name, not your name. Where is your name? Where is the truth 
of you? Did you leave it in Paln where you died? You have forgotten much, O Lord 
of the Two Lands. You have forgotten light, and love, and your own name." 

 "I have your name now, and power over you, Ged the Archmage- Ged who was 
Archmage when he was alive!" 

 "My name is no use to you," Ged said. "You have no power over me at all. I 
am a living man; my body lies on the beach of Selidor, under the sun, on the turning 


earth. And when that body dies, I will be here: but only in name, in name alone, 
in shadow. Do you not understand? Did you never understand, you who called up so 
many shadows from the dead, who summoned all the hosts of the perished, even my 
lord Erreth-Akbe, wisest of us all? Did you not understand that he, even he, is 
but a shadow and a name? His death did not diminish life. Nor did it diminish him. 
He is there - there, not here! Here is nothing, dust and shadows. There, he is the 
earth and sunlight, the leaves of trees, the eagle's flight. He is alive. And all 
who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an 
end. All, save you. For you would not have death. You lost death, you lost life, 
in order to save yourself. Yourself! Your immortal self! What is it? Who are you?" 

 "I am myself. My body will not decay and die-" 

 "A living body suffers pain, Cob; a living body grows old; it dies. Death 
is the price we pay for our life and for all life." 

 "I do not pay it! I can die and in that moment live again! I cannot be killed; 
I am immortal. I alone am myself forever!" 

 "Who are you, then?" 

 "The Immortal One." 

 "Say your name 

 "The King." 

 "Say my name. I told it to you but a minute since. Say my name!" 

 "You are not real. You have no name. Only I exist " 

 "You exist: without name, without form. You cannot see the light of day; you 
cannot see the dark. You sold the green earth and the sun and stars to save yourself. 
But you have no self. All that which you sold, that is yourself. You have given 
everything for nothing. And so now you seek to draw the world to you, all that light 
and life you lost, to fill up your nothingness. But it cannot be filled. Not all 
the songs of earth, not all the stars of heaven, could fill your emptiness." 

 Ged's voice rang like iron, there in the cold valley under the mountains, 
and the blind man cringed away from him. He lifted up his face, and the dim starlight 
shone on it; he looked as if he wept, but he had no tears, having no eyes. His mouth 
opened and shut, full of darkness, but no words came out of it, only a groaning. 
At last he said one word, barely shaping it with his contorted lips, and the word 
was "Life." 

 "I would give you life if I could, Cob. But I cannot. You are dead. But I 
can give you death." 

 "No!" the blind man screamed aloud, and then he said, "No, no," and crouched 
down sobbing, though his cheeks were as dry as the stony rivercourse where only 
night, and no water, ran. "You cannot. No one can ever set me free. I opened the 
door between the worlds and I cannot shut it. No one can shut it. It will never 
be shut again. It draws, it draws me. I must come back to it. I must go through 
it and come back here, into the dust and cold and silence. It sucks at me and sucks 
at me. I cannot leave it. I cannot close it. It will suck all the light out of the 
world in the end. All the rivers will be like the Dry River. There is no power 
anywhere that can close the door I opened!" 

 Very strange was the mixture of despair and vindictiveness, terror and vanity, 
in his words and voice. 

 Ged said only, "Where is it?" 

 "That way. Not far. You can go there. But you cannot do anything there. You 
cannot shut it. If you spent all your power in that one act, it would not be enough. 
Nothing is enough." 

 "Maybe," Ged answered. "Though you chose despair, remember we have not yet 
done so. Take us there." 

 The blind man raised his face, in which fear and hatred struggled visibly. 
Hatred triumphed. "I will not," he said. 

 At that Arren stepped forward, and he said, "You will." 

 The blind man held still. The cold silence and the darkness of the realm of 
the dead surrounded them, surrounded their words. 


 "Who are you?" 

 "My name is Lebannen." 

 Ged spoke: "You who call yourself King, do you not know who this is?" 

 Again Cob held utterly still. Then he said, gasping a little as he spoke, 
"But he is dead - You are dead. You cannot go back. There is no way out. You are 
caught here!" As he spoke, the glimmer of light died away from him, and they heard 
him turn in the darkness and go away from them into it, hastily. "Give me light, 
my lord!" Arren cried, and Ged held up his staff above his head, letting the white 
light break open that old darkness, full of rocks and shadows, among which the tall, 
stooped figure of the blind man hurried and dodged, going upstream from them with 
a strange, unseeing, unhesitating gait. After him Arren came, sword in hand; and 
after him, Ged. 

 Soon Arren had outdistanced his companion, and the light was very faint, much 
interrupted by the boulders and the turnings of the riverbed; but the sound of Cob's 
going, the sense of his presence ahead, was guide enough. Arren drew closer slowly, 
as the way became steeper. They were climbing in a steep gorge choked with stones; 
the Dry River, narrowing to its head, wound between sheer banks. Rocks clattered 
under their feet and under their hands, for they had to clamber. Arren sensed the 
final narrowing-in of the banks, and with a lunge forward came up to Cob and caught 
his arm, halting him there: at a kind of basin of rocks five or six feet wide, what 
might have been a pool if ever water ran there; and above it a tumbled cliff of 
rock and slag. In that cliff there was a black hole, the source of the Dry River. 

 Cob did not try to pull away from him. He stood quite still, while the light 
of Ged's approach brightened on his eyeless face. He had turned that face to Arren. 
"This is the place," he said at last, a kind of smile forming on his lips. "This 
is the place you seek. See it? There you can be reborn. All you need do is follow 
me. You will live immortally. We shall be kings together." 

 Arren looked at that dry, dark springhead, the mouth of dust, the place where 
a dead soul, crawling into earth and darkness, was born again dead: abominable it 
was to him, and he said in a harsh voice, struggling with deadly sickness, "Let 
it be shut!" 

 "It will be shut," Ged said, coming beside them: and the light blazed up now 
from his hands and face as if he were a star fallen on earth in that endless night. 
Before him the dry spring, the door, yawned open. It was wide and hollow, but whether 
deep or shallow there was no telling. There was nothing in it for the light to fall 
on, for the eye to see. It was void. Through it was neither light nor dark, neither 
life nor death. It was nothing. It was a way that led nowhere. 

 Ged raised up his hands and spoke. 

 Arren still held Cob's arm; the blind man had laid his free hand against the 
rocks of the cliff-wall. Both stood still, caught in the power of the spell. 

 With all the skill of his life's training and with all the strength of his 
fierce heart, Ged strove to shut that door, to make the world whole once more. And 
under his voice and the command of his shaping hands the rocks drew together, 
painfully, trying to be whole, to meet. But at the same time the light weakened 
and weakened, dying out from his hands and from his face, dying out from his yew 
staff, until only a little glimmer of it clung there. By that faint light Arren 
saw that the door was nearly closed. 

 Under his hand the blind man felt the rocks move, felt them come together: 
and felt also the art and power giving itself up, spending itself, spent- And all 
at once he shouted, "No!" and broke from Arren's grasp, lunged forward, and caught 
Ged in his blind, powerful grasp. Bearing Ged down under his weight, he closed his 
hands on his throat to strangle him. 

 Arren raised up the sword of Serriadh and brought the blade down straight 
and hard on the bowed neck beneath the matted hair. 

 The living spirit has weight in the world of the dead, and the shadow of his 
sword has an edge. The blade made a great wound, severing Cob's spine. Black blood 
leapt out, lit by the sword's own light. 


 But there is no good in killing a dead man, and Cob was dead, years dead. 
The wound closed, swallowing its blood. The blind man stood up very tall, groping 
out with his long arms at Arren, his face writhing with rage and hatred: as if he 
had just now perceived who his true enemy and rival was. 

 So horrible to see was this recovery from a deathblow, this inability to die, 
more horrible than any dying, that a rage of loathing swelled up in Arren, a berserk 
fury, and swinging up the sword he struck again with it, a full, terrible, downward 
blow. Cob fell with skull split open and face masked with blood, yet Arren was upon 
him at once, to strike again, before the wound could close, to strike until he 
killed... 

 Beside him Ged, struggling to his knees, spoke one word. 

 At the sound of his voice Arren was stopped, as if a hand had grasped his 
sword-arm. The blind man, who had begun to rise, also held utterly still. Ged got 
to his feet; he swayed a little. When he could hold himself erect, he faced the 
cliff. 

 "Be thou made whole!" he said in a clear voice, and with his staff he drew 
in lines of fire across the gate of rocks a figure: the rune Agnen, the Rune of 
Ending, which closes roads and is drawn on coffin lids. And there was then no gap 
or void place among the boulders. The door was shut. 

 The earth of the Dry Land trembled under their feet, and across the unchanging, 
barren sky a long roll of thunder ran and died away. 

 "By the word that will not be spoken until time's end I summoned thee. By 
the word that was spoken at the making of things I now release thee. Go free!" And 
bending over the blind man, who was crouched on his knees, Ged whispered in his 
ear, under the white, tangled hair. 

 Cob stood up. He looked about him slowly, with seeing eyes. He looked at Arren 
and then at Ged. He spoke no word, but gazed at them with dark eyes. There was no 
anger in his face, no hate, no grief. Slowly he turned, went off down the course 
of the Dry River, and soon was gone to sight. 

 There was no more light on Ged's yew staff or in his face. He stood there 
in the darkness. When Arren came to him he caught at the young man's arm to hold 
himself upright. For a moment a spasm of dry sobbing shook him. "It is done," he 
said. "It is all gone." 

 "It is done, dear lord. We must go." 

 "Aye. We must go home." 

 Ged was like one bewildered or exhausted. He followed Arren back down the 
river-course, stumbling along slowly and with difficulty among the rocks and 
boulders. Arren stayed with him. When the banks of the Dry River were low and the 
ground was less steep, he turned toward the way they had come, the long, formless 
slope that led up into the dark. Then he turned away. 

 Ged said nothing. As soon as they halted, he bad sunk down, sitting on a 
lava-boulder, forspent, his head hanging. 

 Arren knew that the way they had come was closed to them. They could only 
go on. They must go all the way. "Even too far is not far enough," he thought. He 
looked up at the black peaks, cold and silent against the unmoving stars, terrible; 
and once more that ironic, mocking voice of his will spoke in him, unrelenting: 
"Will you stop halfway, Lebannen?" 

 He went to Ged and said very gently, "We must go on, my lord." 

 Ged said nothing, but he stood up. 

 "We must go by the mountains, I think." 

 "Thy way, lad," Ged said in a hoarse whisper. "Help me." 

 So they set out up the slopes of dust and scoria into the mountains, Arren 
helping his companion along as well as he could. It was black dark in the combes 
and gorges, so that he had to feel the way ahead, and it was hard for him to give 
Ged support at the same time. Walking was hard, a stumbling matter; but when they 
had to climb and clamber as the slopes grew steeper, that was harder still. The 
rocks were rough, burning their hands like molten iron. Yet it was cold and got 


colder as they went higher. There was a torment in the touch of this earth. It seared 
like live coals: a fire burned within the mountains. But the air was always cold 
and always dark. There was no sound. No wind blew. The sharp rocks broke under their 
hands, and gave way under their feet. Black and sheer, the spurs and chasms went 
up in front of them and fell away beside them into blackness. Behind, below, the 
kingdom of the dead was lost. Ahead, above, the peaks and rocks stood out against 
the stars. And nothing moved in all the length and breadth of those black mountains, 
except the two mortal souls. 

 Ged often stumbled or missed his footing, in weariness. His breath came harder 
and harder, and when his hands came hard against the rocks, he gasped in pain. To 
hear him cry out wrung Arren's heart. He tried to keep him from falling. But often 
the way was too narrow for them to go abreast, or Arren had to go in front to seek 
out footing. And at last, on a high slope that ran up to the stars, Ged slipped 
and fell forward, and did not get up. 

 "My lord," Arren said, kneeling by him, and then spoke his name: "Ged." 

 He did not move or answer. 

 Arren lifted him in his arms and carried him up that high slope. At the end 
of it there was level ground for some way ahead. Arren laid his burden down and 
dropped down beside him, exhausted and in pain, past hope. This was the summit of 
the pass between the two black peaks, for which he had been struggling. This was 
the pass and the end. There was no way farther. The end of the level ground was 
the edge of a cliff: beyond it the darkness went on forever, and the small stars 
hung unmoving in the black gulf of the sky. 

 Endurance may outlast hope. He crawled forward, when he was able to do so, 
doggedly. He looked over the edge of darkness. And below him, only a little way 
below, he saw the beach of ivory sand; the white and amber waves were curling and 
breaking in foam on it, and across the sea the sun was setting in a haze of gold. 

 Arren turned back to the dark. He went back. He lifted Ged up as best he could 
and struggled forward with him until he could not go any farther. There all things 
ceased to be: thirst, and pain, and the dark, and the sun's light, and the sound 
of the breaking sea. 

 

 

 

 

------ 

The Stone of Pain 

------ 

 

 When Arren woke, a grey fog hid the sea and the dunes and hills of Selidor. 
The breakers came murmuring in a low thunder out of the fog and withdrew murmuring 
into it again. The tide was in, and the beach much narrower than when they had first 
come there; the last, small foam-lines of the waves came and licked at Ged's outflung 
left hand as he lay face down on the sand. His clothes and hair were wet, and Arren's 
clothes clung icily to his body, as if once at least the sea had broken over them. 
Of Cob's dead body there was no trace. Maybe the waves had drawn it out to sea. 
But behind Arren, when he turned his head, huge and dim in the mist the grey body 
of Orm Embar bulked like a ruined tower. 

 Arren got up, shuddering with chill; he could barely stand, for cold and 
stiffness and a dizzy weakness like that which comes of lying a long time unmoving. 
He staggered like a drunken man. As soon as he could control his limbs he went to 
Ged and managed to pull him a little way up the sand above the waves' reach, but 
that was all he could do. Very cold, very heavy, Ged seemed to him; he had borne 
him over the boundary from death into life, but maybe in vain. He put his ear to 
Ged's breast, but could not still the shaking in his own limbs and the chattering 
of his teeth to listen for the heartbeat. He stood up again and tried to stamp to 
bring some warmth back into his legs and finally, trembling and dragging his legs 


like an old man, set off to find their packs. They had dropped them beside a little 
stream running down from the ridge of the hills, a long time ago, when they came 
down to the house of bones. It was that stream he sought, for he could not think 
of anything but water, fresh water. 

 Before he expected it, he came to the stream, as it descended onto the beach 
and wandered mazy and branching like a tree of silver to the seas edge. There he 
dropped down and drank, with his face in the water and his hands in the water, sucking 
up the water into his mouth and into his spirit. 

 At last he sat up, and as he did so he saw on the far side of the stream, 
immense, a dragon. 

 Its head, the color of iron, stained as with red rust at nostril and, 
eye-socket and jowl, hung facing him, almost over him. The talons sank deep into 
the soft, wet sand on the edge of the stream. The folded wings were partly visible, 
like sails, but the length of the dark body was lost in the fog. 

 It did not move. It might have been crouching there for hours, or for years, 
or for centuries. It was carven of iron, shaped from rock- but the eyes, the eyes 
he dared not look into, the eyes like oil coiling on water, like yellow smoke behind 
glass, the opaque, profound, yellow eyes watched Arren. 

 There was nothing he could do; so he stood up. If the dragon would kill him, 
it would; and if it did not, he would try to help Ged, if there was any help for 
him. He stood up and started to walk up the rivulet to find their packs. 

 The dragon did nothing. It crouched unmoving and watched. Arren found the 
packs, filled both the skin bottles at the stream, and went back across the sand 
to Ged. After he had taken only a few steps away from the stream, the dragon was 
lost in the thick fog. 

 He gave Ged water, but could not rouse him.. He lay lax and cold, his head 
heavy on Arren's arm. His dark face was greyish, the nose and cheek-bones and the 
old scar standing out harshly. Even his body looked thin and burnt, as if 
half-consumed. 

 Arren sat there on the damp sand, his companion's head on his knees. The fog 
made a vague, soft sphere about them, lighter overhead. Somewhere in the fog was 
the dead dragon Orm Embar, and the live dragon waiting by the stream. And somewhere 
across Selidor the boat Lookfar, with no provisions in her, lay on another beach. 
And then the sea, eastward. Three hundred miles to any other land of the West Reach, 
maybe; a thousand to the Inmost Sea. A long way. "As far as Selidor," they used 
to say on Enlad. The old stories told to children, the myths, began, "As long ago 
as forever and as far away as Selidor, there lived a prince..." 

 He was the prince. But in the old stories, that was the beginning; and this 
seemed to be the end. 

 He was not downcast. Though very tired, and grieving for his companion, he 
felt not the least bitterness or regret. Only there was no longer anything he could 
do. It had all been done. 

 When his strength came back into him, he thought, he would try surf-fishing 
with the line from his pack; for once his thirst was quenched he had begun to feel 
the gnawing of hunger, and their food was gone, all but one packet of hard bread. 
He would save that, for if he soaked and softened it in water he might be able to 
feed some of it to Ged. 

 And that was all there was left to do. Beyond that he could not see; the mist 
was all about him. 

 He felt about in his pockets as he sat there, huddled with Ged in the fog, 
to see if he had anything useful. In his tunic pocket was a hard, sharp-edged thing. 
He drew it forth and looked at it, puzzled. It was a small stone, black, porous, 
hard. He almost tossed it away. Then he felt the edges of it in his hand, rough 
and searing, and felt the weight of it, and knew it for what it was, a bit of rock 
from the Mountains of Pain. It had caught in his pocket as he climbed or when he 
crawled to the edge of the pass with Ged. He held it in his hand� the unchanging 
thing, the stone of pain. He closed his hand on it and held it. And he smiled then, 


a smile both somber and joyous, knowing, for the first time in his life, alone, 
unpraised, and at the end of the world, victory. 

 

 The mists thinned and moved. Far out through them he saw sunlight on the open 
sea. The dunes and hills came and went, colorless and enlarged by the veils of fog: 
Sunlight struck bright on the body of Orm Embar, magnificent in death. 

 The iron-black dragon crouched, never moving, on the far side of the stream. 

 Past noon the sun grew clear and warm, burning the last blur of mist out of 
the air. Arren threw off his wet clothes and let them dry, and went naked save for 
his swordbelt and sword. He let the sun dry Ged's clothing likewise, but though 
the great, healing, comfortable flood of heat and light poured down on Ged, yet 
he lay still. 

 There was a noise as of metal rubbing against metal, the grating whisper of 
crossed swords. The ironcolored dragon had risen on its crooked legs. It moved and 
crossed the rivulet, with a soft hissing sound as it dragged its long body through 
the sand. Arren saw the wrinkles at the shoulder joints, the mail of the flanks 
scored and scarred like the armor of Erreth-Akbe, and the long teeth yellowed and 
blunt. In all this, and in its sure, ponderous movements, and in a deep and 
frightening calmness that it had, he saw the sign of age: of great age, of years 
beyond remembering. So when the dragon stopped some few feet from where Ged lay, 
and Arren stood up between the two, he said, in Hardic for he did not know the Old 
Speech, "Art thou Kalessin?" 

 The dragon said no word, but it seemed to smile. Then, lowering its huge head 
and sticking out its neck, it looked down at Ged, and spoke his name. 

 Its voice was huge, and soft, and smelt like a blacksmith's forge. 

 Again it spoke, and once more; and at the third time, Ged opened his eyes. 
After a while he tried to sit up, but could not. Arren knelt by him and supported 
him. Then Ged spoke. "Kalessin," he said, "senvanissai'n ar Roke!" He had no more 
strength after speaking; he leaned his head on Arren's shoulder and shut his eyes. 

 The dragon made no reply. It crouched as before, not moving. The fog was coming 
in again, dimming the sun as it went down to the sea. 

 Arren dressed and wrapped Ged in his cloak. The tide which had drawn far out 
was coming in again, and he thought to carry his companion up to dryer ground on 
the dunes, for he felt his strength coming back. 

 But as he bent to lift Ged up, the dragon put out a great, mailed foot, almost 
touching him. The talons of that foot were four, with a spur behind such as a cock's 
foot has, but these were spurs of steel, and as long as scythe-blades. 

 "Sobriost," said the dragon, like a January wind through frozen reeds. 

 "Let my lord be. He has saved us all, and doing so has spent his strength 
and maybe his life with it. Let him be!" 

 So Arren spoke, fiercely and with command. He had been overawed and frightened 
too much, he had been filled up with fear, and had got sick of it and would not 
have it any more. He was angry with the dragon for its brute strength and size, 
its unjust advantage. He had seen death, he had tasted death, and no threat had 
power over him. 

 The old dragon Kalessin looked at him from one long, awful, golden eye. There 
were ages beyond ages in the depths of that eye; the morning of the world was deep 
in it. Though Arren did not look into it, he knew that it looked upon him with 
profound and mild hilarity. 

 "Arw sobriost," said the dragon, and its rusty nostrils widened so that the 
banked and stifled fire deep within them glittered. 

 Arren had his arm under Ged's shoulders, having been in the act of lifting 
him when Kalessin's movement stopped him, and now he felt Ged's head turn a little 
and heard his voice: "It means, mount here." 

 For a while Arren did not move. This was all folly. But there was the great, 
taloned foot, set like a step in front of him; and above it, the crook of the elbow 
joint; and above that, the jutting shoulder and the musculature of the wing where 


it sprang from the shoulder blade: four steps, a stairway. And there in front of 
the wings and the first great iron thorn of the spine-armor, in the hollow of the 
neck there was place for a man to sit astride, or two men. If they were mad and 
past hope and given up to folly. 

 "Mount!" said Kalessin in the speech of the Making. 

 So Arren stood up and helped his companion to stand. Ged held his head erect, 
and with Arren's arms to guide him, climbed up those strange steps. Both sat down 
astride in the rough-mailed hollow of the dragon's neck, Arren behind, ready to 
support Ged if he needed it. Both felt a warmth come into them, a welcome heat like 
the sun's heat, where they touched the dragon's hide: life burnt in fire beneath 
that iron armor. 

 Arren saw that they had left the mage's staff of yew lying half-buried in 
the sand; the sea was creeping in to take it. He made to get down for it, but Ged 
stopped him. "Leave it. I spent all wizardry at that dry spring, Lebannen. I am 
no mage now." 

 Kalessin turned and looked at them sidelong; the ancient laughter was in its 
eye. Whether Kalessin was male or female, there was no telling; what Kalessin 
thought, there was no knowing. Slowly the wings lifted and unfurled. They were not 
gold like Orm Embar's wings but red, dark red, dark as rust or blood or the crimson 
silk of Lorbanery. The dragon raised its wings carefully, lest it unseat its puny 
riders. Carefully it gathered in the spring of its great haunches, and leapt like 
a cat up into the air, and the wings beat down and bore them above the fog that 
drifted over Selidor. 

 Rowing with those crimson wings in the evening air, Kalessin wheeled out over 
the open sea, turned to the east, and flew. 

 

 In the days of high summer on the island of Ully a great dragon was seen flying 
low, and later in Usidero and in the north of Ontuego. Though dragons are dreaded 
in the West Reach, where people know them all too well, yet after this one had passed 
over and the villagers had come out of their hiding places, those who had seen it 
said, "The dragons are not all dead, as we thought. Maybe the wizards are not all 
dead, either. Surely there was a great splendor in that flight; maybe it was the 
Eldest." 

 Where Kalessin touched to land none saw. In those far islands there are 
forests and wild hills to which few men ever come, and where even the descent of 
a dragon may go unseen. 

 But in the Ninety Isles there was screaming and disarray. Men rowed westward 
among the little islands crying, "Hide! Hide! The Dragon of Pendor has broken his 
word! The Archmage has perished, and the Dragon is come devouring!" 

 Without landing, without looking down, the great ironcolored worm flew over 
the little islands and the little towns and farms, and deigned not even a belch 
of fire for such small fry. So it passed over Geath and over Serd, and crossed the 
straits of the Inmost Sea, and came within sight of Roke. 

 Never in the memory of man, scarcely in the memory of legend, had any dragon 
braved the walls visible and invisible of the well-defended isle. Yet this one did 
not hesitate, but flew on ponderous wings and heavily over the western shore of 
Roke, above the villages and fields, to the green hill that rises over Thwil Town. 
There at last it stooped softly to the earth, raised its red wings and folded them, 
and crouched on the summit of Roke Knoll. 

 The boys came running out of the Great House. Nothing could have stopped them. 
But for all their youth they were slower than their Masters and came second to the 
Knoll. When they came, the Patterner was there, come from his Grove, his fair hair 
bright in the sun. With him was the Changer, who had returned two nights before 
in the shape of a great seaosprey, lame-winged and weary; long he had been caught 
by his own spells in that form and could not come into his own shape again until 
he came into the Grove, on that night when the Balance was restored and the broken 
was made whole. The Summoner, gaunt and frail, only one day risen from his bed, 


had come; and beside him stood the Doorkeeper. And the other Masters of the Isle 
of the Wise were there. 

 They saw the riders dismount, one aiding the other. They saw them look about 
with a look of strange contentment, grimness, and wonder. The dragon crouched like 
stone while they clambered down from its back and stood beside it. It turned its 
head a little while the Archmage spoke to it, and briefly answered him. Those who 
watched saw the sidelong look of the yellow eye, cold and full of laughter. Those 
who understood heard the dragon say, "I have brought the young king to his kingdom, 
and the old man to his home." 

 "A little farther yet, Kalessin," Ged replied. "I have not gone where I must 
go." He looked down at the roofs and towers of the Great House in the sunlight, 
and he seemed to smile a little. Then he turned to Arren, who stood tall and slight, 
in worn clothes, and not wholly steady on his legs from the weariness of the long 
ride and the bewilderment of all that had passed. In the sight of them all, Ged 
knelt to him, down on both knees, and bowed his grey head. 

 Then he stood up and kissed the young man on the cheek, saying, "When you 
come to your throne in Havnor, my lord and dear companion, rule long and well." 

 He looked again at the Masters and the young wizards and the boys and the 
towns-folk gathered on the slopes and at the foot of the Knoll. His face was quiet, 
and in his eyes there was something like that laughter in the eyes of Kalessin. 
Turning from them all, he mounted up again by the dragon's foot and shoulder, and 
took his seat reinless between the great peaks of the wings, on the neck of the 
dragon. The red wings lifted with a drumming rattle, and Kalessin the Eldest sprang 
into the air. Fire came from the dragon's jaws, and smoke, and the sound of thunder 
and the stormwind was in the beating of its wings. It circled the hill once and 
flew off, north and eastward, toward that quarter of Earthsea where stands the 
mountain isle of Gont. 

 The Doorkeeper, smiling, said, "He has done with doing. He goes home." 

 And they watched the dragon fly between the sunlight and the sea till it was 
out of sight. 

 

-- 

 The Deed of Ged tells that he who had been Archmage came to the crowning of 
the King of All the Isles in the Tower of the Sword in Havnor at the world's heart. 
The song tells that when the ceremony of the crowning was over and the festival 
began, he left the company and went down alone to the port of Havnor. There lay 
out on the water a boat, worn and beaten by storm and the weather of years; she 
had no sail up and was empty. Ged called the boat by name, Lookfar, and she came 
to him. Entering the boat from the pier Ged turned his back on land, and without 
wind or sail or oar the boat moved; it took him from harbor and from haven, westward 
among the isles, westward over sea; and no more is known of him. 

 But in the island of Gont they tell the story otherwise, saying that it was 
the young King, Lebannen, who came seeking Ged to bring him to the coronation. But 
he did not find him at Gont Port or at Re Albi. No one could say where he was, only 
that he had gone afoot up into the forests of the mountain. Often he went so, they 
said, and did not return for many months, and no man knew the roads of his solitude. 
Some offered to seek for him, but the King forbade them, saying, "He rules a greater 
kingdom than I do." And so he left the mountain, and took ship, and returned to 
Havnor to be crowned. 

 

 

 

---End--- 

 

 


 

URSULA K. Le GUIN 

 

TEHANU 

The Last Book of Earthsea 

 

A Jean Karl Book 

ATHENEUM 1990 NEW YORK 


 

 

 

 

 

Only in silence the word, 

only in dark the light, 

only in dying life: 

bright the hawk�s flight on the empty sky. 

 -The Creation of Ea 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contents 

A Bad Thing 

Going to the Falcon's Nest 

Ogion 

Kalessin 

Bettering 

Worsening 

Mice 

Hawks 

Finding Words 

The Dolphin 

Home 

Winter 

The Master 

Tehanu 


 

 

 

 

 

 

A Bad Thing 

After Farmer Flint of the Middle Valley died, his widow stayed on at the farmhouse. Her son had gone to sea 
and her daughter had married a merchant of Valmouth, so she lived alone at Oak Farm. People said she had 
been some kind of great person in the foreign land she came from, and indeed the mage Ogion used to stop 
by Oak Farm to see her; but that didn�t count for much, since Ogion visited all sorts of nobodies. 

 She had a foreign name, but Flint had called her Goha, which is what they call a little white web-spinning 
spider on Gont. That name fit well enough, she being white-skinned and small and a good spinner of 
goat�s-wool and sheep-fleece. So now she was Flint�s widow, Goha, mistress of a flock of sheep and the 
land to pasture them, four fields, an orchard of pears, two tenants� cottages, the old stone farmhouse under 
the oaks, and the family graveyard over the hill where Flint lay, earth in his earth. 

 �I�ve generally lived near tombstones,� she said to her daughter. 

 �Oh, mother, come live in town with us!� said Apple, but the widow would not leave her solitude. 

 �Maybe later, when there are babies and you�ll need a hand,� she said, looking with pleasure at her 
grey-eyed daughter. �But not now. You don�t need me, And I like it here.� 

 When Apple had gone back to her young husband, the widow closed the door and stood on the 
stone-flagged floor of the kitchen of the farmhouse. It was dusk, but she did not light the lamp, thinking of 
her own husband lighting the lamp: the hands, the spark, the intent, dark face in the catching glow. The 
house was silent. 

 �I used to live in a silent house, alone,� she thought. �I will do so again.� She lighted the lamp. 

In a late afternoon of the first hot weather, the widow�s old friend Lark came out from the village, hurrying 
along the dusty lane. �Goha,� she said, seeing her weeding in the bean patch, �Goha, it�s a bad thing. It�s a 
very bad thing. Can you come?� 

 �Yes,� the widow said. �What would the bad thing be?� Lark caught her breath. She was a heavy, plain, 
middle-aged woman, whose name did not fit her body any more. But once she had been a slight and pretty 
girl, and she had befriended Goha, paying no attention to the villagers who gossiped about that white-faced 
Kargish witch Flint had brought home; and friends they had been ever since. 

 �A burned child,� she said. 

 �Whose?� 

 �Tramps�.� 

 Goha went to shut the farmhouse door, and they set off along the lane, Lark talking as they went. She was 
short of breath and sweating. Tiny seeds of the heavy grasses that lined the lane stuck to her cheeks and 
forehead, and she brushed at them as she talked. �They�ve been camped in the river meadows all the month. 
A man, passed himself off as a tinker, but he�s a thief, and a woman with him. And another man, younger, 
hanging around with them most of the time. Not working, any of �em. Filching and begging and living off 
the woman. Boys from downriver were bring- ing them farmstuff to get at her. You know how it is now, that 
kind of thing. And gangs on the roads and coming by farms. If I were you, I�d lock my door, these days. So 
this one, this younger fellow, comes into the village, and I was out in front of our house, and he says, �The 
child�s not well.� I�d barely seen a child with them, a little ferret of a thing, slipped out of sight so quick I 
wasn�t sure it was there at all. So I said, �Not well? A fever?� And the fellow says, �She hurt herself, lighting 
the fire,� and then before I�d got myself ready to go with him he�d made off. Gone. And when I went out 
there by the river, the other pair was gone too. Cleared out. Nobody. All their traps and trash gone too. There 


was just their campfire, still smoldering, and just by it-partly in it-on the ground-� 

 Lark stopped talking for several steps. She looked straight ahead, not at Goha. 

 �They hadn�t even put a blanket over her,� she said. 

 She strode on. 

 �She�d been pushed into the fire while it was burning,� she said. She swallowed, and brushed at the 
sticking seeds on her hot face. �I�d say maybe she fell, but if she�d been awake she�d have tried to save 
herself. They beat her and thought they�d killed her, I guess, and wanted to hide what they�d done to her, so 
they-� 

 She stopped again, went on again. 

 �Maybe it wasn�t him. Maybe he pulled her out. He came to get help for her, after all. It must have been 
the father. I don�t know. It doesn�t matter. Who�s to know? Who�s to care? Who�s to care for the child? Why 
do we do what we do?� 

 Goha asked in a low voice, �Will she live?� 

 �She might,� Lark said. �She might well live.� 

 After a while, as they neared the village, she said, �I don�t know why I had to come to you. Ivy�s there. 
There�s nothing to be done.� 

 �I could go to Valmouth, for Beech.� 

 �Nothing he could do. It�s beyond. . . beyond help. I got her warm. Ivy�s given her a potion and a sleeping 
charm. I carried her home. She must be six or seven but she didn�t weigh what a two-year-old would. She 
never really waked. But she makes a sort of gasping. . . . I know there isn�t anything you can do. But I 
wanted you.� 

 �I want to come,� Goha said. But before they entered Lark�s house, she shut her eyes and held her breath 
a moment in dread. 

 Lark�s children had been sent outdoors, and the house was silent. The child lay unconscious on Lark�s 
bed. The village witch, Ivy, had smeared an ointment of witch hazel and heal-all on the lesser burns, but had 
not touched the right side of the face and head and the right hand, which had been charred to the bone. She 
had drawn the rune Pirr above the bed, and left it at that. 

 �Can you do anything?� Lark asked in a whisper. 

 Goha stood looking down at the burned child. Her hands were still. She shook her head. 

 �You learned healing, up on the mountain, didn�t you?� Pain and shame and rage spoke through Lark, 
begging for relief. 

 �Even Ogion couldn�t heal this,� the widow said. 

 Lark turned away, biting her lip, and wept. Goha held her, stroking her grey hair. They held each other. 

 The witch Ivy came in from the kitchen, scowling at the sight of Goha. Though the widow cast no charms 
and worked no spells, it was said that when she first came to Gont she had lived at Re Albi as a ward of the 
mage, and that she knew the Archmage of Roke, and no doubt had foreign and uncanny powers. Jealous of 
her prerogative, the witch went to the bed and busied herself beside it, making a mound of something in a 
dish and setting it afire so that it smoked and reeked while she muttered a curing charm over and over. The 
rank herbal smoke made the burned child cough and half rouse, flinching and shuddering. She began to 
make a gasping noise, quick, short, scraping breaths. Her one eye seemed to look up at Goha. 

 Goha stepped forward and took the child�s left hand in hers. She spoke in her own language. �I served 
them and I left them,� she said. �I will not let them have you. 

 The child stared at her or at nothing, trying to breathe, and trying again to breathe, and trying again to 


breathe. 

 

 

 

 

 

Going to the Falcon �s Nest 

It was more than a year later, in the hot and spacious days after the Long Dance, that a messenger came 
down the road from the north to Middle Valley asking for the widow Goha. People in the village put him on 
the path, and he came to Oak Farm late in the afternoon. He was a sharp-faced, quick-eyed man. He looked 
at Goha and at the sheep in the fold beyond her and said, �Fine lambs. The Mage of Re Albi sends for you.� 

�He sent you?� Goha inquired, disbelieving and amused. Ogion, when he wanted her, had quicker and 
finer messengers: an eagle calling, or only his own voice saying her name quietly- Will you come? 

The man nodded. �He�s sick,� he said. �Will you be selling off any of the ewe lambs?� 

�I might. You can talk to the shepherd if you like. Over by the fence there. Do you want supper? You can 
stay the night here if you want, but I�ll be on my way. 

�Tonight?� 

This time there was no amusement in her look of mild scorn. �I won�t be waiting about,� she said. She 
spoke for a minute with the old shepherd, Clearbrook, and then turned away, going up to the house built into 
the hillside by the oak grove. The messenger followed her. 

In the stone-floored kitchen, a child whom he looked at once and quickly looked away from served him 
milk, bread, cheese, and green onions, and then went off, never saying a word. She reappeared beside the 
woman, both shod for travel and carrying light leather packs. The messenger followed them out, and the 
widow locked the farmhouse door. They all set off together, he on his business, for the message from Ogion 
had been a mere favor added to the serious matter of buying a breeding ram for the Lord of Re Albi; and the 
woman and the burned child bade him farewell where the lane turned off to the village. They went on up the 
road he had come down, northward and then west into the foothills of Gont Mountain. 

They walked until the long summer twilight began to darken. They left the narrow road then and made 
camp in a dell down by a stream that ran quick and quiet, reflecting the pale evening sky between thickets of 
scrub willow. Goha made a bed of dry grass and willow leaves, hidden among the thickets like a hare�s form, 
and rolled the child up in a blanket on it. �Now,� she said, �you�re a cocoon. In the morning you�ll be a 
butterfly and hatch out.� She lighted no fire, but lay in her cloak beside the child and watched the stars shine 
one by one and listened to what the stream said quietly, until she slept. 

When they woke in the cold before the dawn, she made a small fire and heated a pan of water to make 
oatmeal gruel for the child and herself. The little ruined butterfly came shivering from her cocoon, and Goha 
cooled the pan in the dewy grass so that the child could hold it and drink from it. The east was brightening 
above the high, dark shoulder of the mountain when they set off again. 

They walked all day at the pace of a child who tired easily. The woman�s heart yearned to make haste, but 
she walked slowly. She was not able to carry the child any long distance, and so to make the way easier for 
her she told her stories. 

�We�re going to see a man, an old man, called Ogion,� she told her as they trudged along the narrow road 
that wound upward through the forests. �He�s a wise man, and a wizard. Do you know what a wizard is, 


Therru?� 

If the child had had a name, she did not know it or would not say it. Goha called her Therru. 

She shook her head. 

�Well, neither do I,� said the woman. �But I know what they can do. When I was young-older than you, 
but young--Ogion was my father, the way I�m your mother now. He looked after me and tried to teach me 
what I needed to know. He stayed with me when he�d rather have been wandering by himself. He liked to 
walk, all along these roads like we�re doing now, and in the forests, in the wild places. He went everywhere 
on the mountain, looking at things, listening. He always listened, so they called him the Silent. But he used 
to talk to me. He told me stories. Not only the great stories everybody learns, the heroes and the kings and 
the things that happened long ago and far away, but stories only he knew.� She walked on a way before she 
went on. �I�ll tell you one of those stories now. 

�One of the things wizards can do is turn into something else-take another form. Shape-changing, they 
call it. An ordinary sorcerer can make himself look like somebody else, or like an animal, just so you don�t 
know for a minute what you�re seeing-as if he�d put on a mask. But the wizards and mages can do more than 
that. They can be the mask, they can truly change into another being. So a wizard, if he wanted to cross the 
sea and had no boat, might turn himself into a gull and fly across. But he has to be careful. If he stays a bird, 
he begins to think what a bird thinks and 

forget what a man thinks, and he might fly off and be a gull and never a man again. So they say there was a 
great wizard once who liked to turn himself into a bear, and did it too often, and became a bear, and killed his 
own little son; and they had to hunt him down and kill him. But Ogion used to joke about it, too. Once when 
the mice got into his pantry and ruined the cheese, he caught one with a tiny mousetrap spell, and he held the 
mouse up like this and looked it in the eye and said, �I told you not to play mouse!� And for a minute I 
thought he meant it. . . 

�Well, this story is about something like shape-changing, but -Ogion said it was beyond all 
shape-changing he knew, because it was about being two things, two beings, at once, and in the same form, 
and he said that this is beyond the power of wizards. But he met with it in a little village around on the 
northwest coast of Gont, a place called Kemay, There was a woman there, an old fisherwoman, not a witch, 
not learned; but she made songs. That�s how -Ogion came to hear of her. He was wandering there, the way 
he did, going along the coast, listening; and he heard somebody singing, mending a net or caulking a boat 
and singing as they worked: 

 

Farther west than west beyond the land 

my people are dancing on the other wind. 

 

�It was the tune and the words both that -Ogion heard, and he had never heard them before, so he asked 
where the song came from. And from one answer to another, he went along to where somebody said, �-Oh, 
that�s one of the songs of the Woman of Kemay.� So he went on along to Kemay, the little fishing port where 
the woman lived, and he found her house down by the harbor. And he knocked on the door with his mage�s 
staff. And she came and opened the door. 

�Now you know, you remember when we talked about names, how children have child-names, and 
everybody has a use-name, and maybe a nickname too. Different people may call you differently. You�re 
my Therru, but maybe you�ll have a Hardic use-name when you get older. But also, when you come into 
your womanhood, you will, if all be rightly done, be given your true name. It will be given you by one of 


true power, a wizard or a mage, because that is their power, their art-naming. And that�s the name you�ll 
maybe never tell another person, because your own self is in your true name. It is your strength, your power; 
but to another it is risk and burden, only to be given in utmost need and trust. But a great mage, knowing all 
names, may know it without your telling him. 

�So Ogion, who is a great mage, stood at the door of the little house there by the seawall, and the old 
woman opened the door. Then Ogion stepped back, and he held up his oak staff, and put up his hand, too, 
like this, as if trying to protect himself from the heat of afire, and in his amazement and fear he said her true 
name aloud-� Dragon!� 

�In that first moment, he told me, it was no woman he saw at all in the doorway, but a blaze and glory of 
fire, and a glitter of gold scales and talons, and the great eyes of a dragon. They say you must not look into a 
dragon�s eyes. 

�Then that was gone, and he saw no dragon, but an old woman standing there in the doorway, a bit 
stooped, a tall old fisherwoman with big hands. She looked at him as he did at her. And she said, �Come in, 
Lord Ogion.� 

�So he went in. She served him fish soup, and they ate, and then they talked by her fire. He thought that 
she must 

be a shape-changer, but he didn�t know, you see, whether she was a woman who could change herself into a 
dragon, or a dragon who could change itself into a woman. So he asked her at last, �Are you woman or 
dragon?� And she didn�t say, but she said, �I�ll sing you a story I know.� � 

Therru had a little stone in her shoe. They stopped to get that out, and went on, very slowly, for the road 
was climbing steeply between cut banks of stone overhung by thickets where the cicadas sang in the summer 
heat. 

�So this is the story she sang to him, to Ogion. 

�When Segoy raised the islands of the world from the sea in the beginning of time, the dragons were the 
first born of the land and the wind blowing over the land. So the Song of the Creation tells. But her song told 
also that then, in the beginning, dragon and human were all one. They were all one people, one race, winged, 
and speaking the True Language. 

�They were beautiful, and strong, and wise, and free. 

�But in time nothing can be without becoming. So among the dragon-people some became more and 
more in love with flight and wildness, and would have less and less to do with the works of making, or with 
study and learning, or with houses and cities. They wanted only to fly farther and farther, hunting and eating 
their kill, ignorant and uncaring, seeking more freedom and more. 

�Others of the dragon-people came to care little for flight, but gathered up treasure, wealth, things made, 
things learned. They built houses, strongholds to keep their treasures in, so they could pass all they gained to 
their children, ever seeking more increase and more. And they came to fear the wild ones, who might come 
flying and destroy all their dear hoard, burn it up in a blast of flame out of mere carelessness and ferocity. 

�The wild ones feared nothing. They learned nothing. Because they were ignorant and fearless, they could 
not save themselves when the flightless ones trapped them as animals and killed them. But other wild ones 
would come flying and set the beautiful houses afire, and destroy, and kill. Those that were strongest, wild 
or wise, were those who killed each other first. 

�Those who were most afraid, they hid from the fighting, and when there was no more hiding they ran 
from it. They used their skills of making and made boats and sailed east, away from the western isles where 
the great winged ones made war among the ruined towers. 


�So those who had been both dragon and human changed, becoming two peoples-the dragons, always 
fewer and wilder, scattered by their endless, mindless greed and anger, in the far islands of the Western 
Reach; and the human folk, always more numerous in their rich towns and cities, filling up the Inner Isles 
and all the south and east. But among them there were some who saved the learning of the dragons-the True 
Language of the Making-and these are now the wizards. 

�But also, the song.said, there are those among us who know they once were dragons, and among the 
dragons there are some who know their kinship with us. And these say that when the one people were 
becoming two, some of them, still both human and dragon, still winged, went not east but west, on over the 
Open Sea, till they came to the other side of the world. There they live in peace, great winged beings both 
wild and wise, with human mind and dragon heart. And so she sang, 

 

Farther west than west beyond the land 

my people are dancing on the other wind. 

�So that was the story told in the song of the Woman of Kemay, and it ended with those words. 

�Then -Ogion said to her, �When I first saw you I saw your true being. This woman who sits across the 
hearth from me is no more than the dress she wears.� 

�But she shook her head and laughed, and all she would say was, �If only it were that simple!� 

�So then after a while Ogion came back to Re Albi. And when he told me the story, he said to me, �Ever 
since that day, I have wondered if anyone, man or dragon, has been farther west than west; and who we are, 
and where our wholeness lies.� . . . Are you getting hungry, Therru? There�s a good sitting place, it looks like, 
up there where the road turns. Maybe from there we�ll be able to see Gont Port, away down at the foot of the 
mountain. It�s a big city, even bigger than Valmouth. We�ll sit down when we get to the turn, and rest a bit.� 

From the high corner of the road they could indeed look down the vast slopes of forest and rocky meadow 
to the town on its bay, and see the crags that guarded the entrance to the bay, and the boats on the dark water 
like wood-chips or water beetles. Far ahead on their road and still somewhat above it, a cliff jutted out from 
the mountainside: the Over-fell, on which was the village of Re Albi, the Falcon�s Nest. 

Therru made no complaints, but when presently Goha said, �Well, shall we go on?� the child, sitting there 
between the road and the gulfs of sky and sea, shook her head. The sun was warm, and they had walked a 
long way since their breakfast in the dell. 

Goha brought out their water bottle, and they drank again; then she brought out a bag of raisins and 
walnuts and gave it to the child. 

�We�re in sight of where we�re going,� she said, �and I�d like to be there before dark, if we can. I�m anxious 
to see Ogion. You�ll be very tired, but we won�t walk fast. And we�ll be there safe and warm tonight. Keep 
the bag, tuck it in your belt. Raisins make your legs strong. Would you like a staff-like a wizard-to help you 
walk?� 

Therru munched and nodded. Goha took out her knife and cut a strong shoot of hazel for the child, and 
then seeing an alder fallen above the road, broke off a branch of it and trimmed it to make herself a stout, 
light stick. 

They set off again, and the child trudged along, beguiled by raisins. Goha sang to amuse them both, love 
songs and shepherd�s songs and ballads she had learned in the Middle Valley; but all at once her voice 
hushed in the middle of a tune. She stopped, putting out her hand in a warning gesture. 

The four men ahead of them on the road had seen her. There was no use trying to hide in the woods till 
they went on or went by. 


�Travelers,� she said quietly to Therru, and walked on. She took a good grip on her alder stick. 

What Lark had said about gangs and thieves was not just the complaint each generation makes that things 
aren�t what they used to be and the world�s going to the dogs. In the last several years there had been a loss 
of peace and trust in the towns and countrysides of Gont. Young men behaved like strangers among their 
own people, abusing hospitality, stealing, selling what they stole. Beggary was common where it had been 
rare, and the unsatisfied beggar threatened violence. Women did not like to go alone in the streets and roads, 
nor did they like that loss of freedom. Some of the young women ran off to join the gangs of thieves and 
poachers. Often they came home within the year, sullen, bruised, and pregnant. And among village sorcerers 
and witches there was rumor of matters of their 

profession going amiss: charms that had always cured did not cure; spells of finding found nothing, or the 
wrong thing; love potions drove men into frenzies not of desire but of murderous jealousy. And worse than 
this, they said, people who knew nothing of the art of magic, the laws and limits of it and the dangers of 
breaking them, were calling themselves people of power, promising wonders of wealth and health to their 
followers, promising even immortality. 

Ivy, the witch of Goha�s village, had spoken darkly of this weakening of magic, and so had Beech, the 
sorcerer of Valmouth. He was a shrewd and modest man, who had come to help Ivy do what little could be 
done to lessen the pain and scarring of Therru�s burns. He had said to Goha, �I think a time in which such 
things as this occur must be a time of ruining, the end of an age. How many hundred years since there was a 
king in Havnor? It can�t go on so. We must turn to the center again or be lost, island against island, man 
against man, father against child He had glanced at her, somewhat timidly, yet with his clear, shrewd look. 
�The Ring of Erreth-Akbe is restored to the Tower in Havnor,� he said. �I know who brought it there That 
was the sign, surely, that was the sign of the new age to come! But we haven�t acted on it. We have no king. 
We have no center. We must find our heart, our strength. Maybe the Archmage will act at last.� And he 
added, with confidence �After all, he is from Gont.� 

But no word of any deed of the Archmage, or any heir to the Throne in Havnor, had come; and things 
went badly on. 

So it was with fear and a grim anger that Goha saw the four men on the road before her step two to each 
side, so that she and the child would have to pass between them. 

As they went walking steadily forward, Therru kept very close beside her, holding her head bent down, but 
she did not take her hand. 

One of the men, a big-chested fellow with coarse black hairs on his upper lip drooping over his mouth, 
began to speak, grinning a little. �Hey, there,� he said, but Goha spoke at the same time and louder. �Out of 
my way!� she said, raising her alder stick as if it were a wizard�s staff-� I have business with Ogion!� She 
strode between the men and straight on, Therru trotting beside her. The men, mistaking effrontery for 
witchery, stood still. Ogion�s name perhaps still held power. Or perhaps there was a power in Goha, or in the 
child. For when the two had gone by, one of the men said, �Did you see that?� and spat and made the sign to 
avert evil. 

�Witch and her monster brat,� another said. �Let em go!� 

Another, a man in a leather cap and jerkin, stood staring for a moment while the others slouched on their 
way. His face looked sick and stricken, yet he seemed to be turning to follow the woman and child, when the 
hairy-lipped man called to him, �Come on, Handy!� and he obeyed. 

Out of sight around the turn of the road, Goha had picked up Therm and hurried on with her until she had 
to set her down and stand gasping. The child asked no questions and made no delays. As soon as Goha could 


go on again, the child walked as fast as she could beside her, holding her hand. 

�You�re red,� she said. �Like fire.� 

She spoke seldom, and not clearly, her voice being very hoarse; but Goha could understand her. 

�I�m angry,� Goha said with a kind of laugh. �When I�m angry I turn red. Like you people, you red 
people, you barbarians of the western lands. . . . Look, there�s a town 

there ahead, that�ll be Oak Springs. It�s the only village on this road. We�ll stop there and rest a little. Maybe 
we can get some milk. And then, if we can go on, if you think you can walk on up to the Falcon�s Nest, we�ll 
be there by nightfall, I hope.� 

The child nodded. She opened her bag of raisins and walnuts and ate a few. They trudged on. 

The sun had long set when they came through the village and to Ogion�s house on the cliff-top. The first 
stars glimmered above a dark mass of clouds in the west over the high horizon of the sea. The sea wind blew, 
bowing short grasses. A goat bleated in the pastures behind the low, small house. The one window shone 
dim yellow. 

Goha stood her stick and Therm�s against the wall by the door, and held the child�s hand, and knocked 
once. 

There was no answer. 

She pushed the door open. The fire on the hearth was out, cinders and grey ashes, but an oil lamp on the table 
made a tiny seed of light, and from his mattress on the floor in the far corner of the room Ogion said, �Come 
in, Tenar.� 

 

 

 

 

Ogion 

She bedded down the child on the cot in the western alcove. She built up the fire. She went and sat down 
beside Ogion�s pallet, cross-legged on the floor. 

�No one looking after you!� 

�I sent �em off,� he whispered. 

His face was as dark and hard as ever, but his hair was thin and white, and the dim lamp made no spark of 
light in his eyes. 

�You could have died alone,� she said, fierce. �Help me do that,� the old man said. �Not yet,� she pleaded, 
stooping, laying her forehead on his hand. 

�Not tonight,� he agreed. �Tomorrow.� 

He lifted his hand to stroke her hair once, having that much strength. 

She sat up again. The fire had caught. Its light played on the walls and low ceiling and sent shadows to 
thicken in the corners of the long room. 

�If Ged would come,� the old man murmured. 

�Have you sent to him?� 

�Lost,� Ogion said. �He�s lost. A cloud. A mist over the lands. He went into the west. Carrying the branch 
of the rowan tree. Into the dark mist. I�ve lost my hawk.� 

�No, no, no,� she whispered. �He�ll come back.� 

They were silent. The fire�s warmth began to penetrate them both, letting Ogion relax and drift in and out 


of sleep, letting Tenar find rest pleasant after the long day afoot. She rubbed her feet and her aching 
shoulders. She had carried Therru part of the last long climb, for the child had begun to gasp with weariness 
as she tried to keep up. 

Tenar got up, heated water, and washed the dust of the road from her. She heated milk, and ate bread she 
found in Ogion�s larder, and came back to sit by him. While he slept, she sat thinking, watching his face and 
the firelight and the shadows. 

She thought how a girl had sat silent, thinking, in the night, a long time ago and far away, a girl in a 
windowless room, brought up to know herself only as the one who had been eaten, priestess and servant of 
the powers of the darkness of the earth. And there had been a woman who would sit up in the peaceful 
silence of a farmhouse when husband and children slept, to think, to be alone an hour. And there was the 
widow who had carried a burned child here, who sat by the side of the dying, who waited for a man to return. 
Like all women, any woman, doing what women do. But it was not by the names of the servant or the wife or 
the widow that Ogion had called her. Nor had Ged, in the darkness of the Tombs. Nor-longer ago, farther 
away than all-had her mother, the mother she remembered only as the warmth and lion-color of firelight, the 
mother who had given her her name. 

�I am Tenar,� she whispered. The fire, catching a dry branch of pine, leaped up in a .bright yellow tongue 
of flame. 

Ogion�s breathing became troubled and he struggled for air. She helped him as she could till he found some 
ease. 

 They both slept for a while, she drowsing by his dazed and drifting silence, broken by strange words. 
Once in the deep night he said aloud, as if meeting a friend in the road, �Are you here, then? Have you seen 
him?� And again, when Tenar roused herself to build up the fire, he began to speak, but this time it seemed 
he spoke to someone in his memory of years long gone, for he said clearly as a child might, �I tried to help 
her, but the roof of the house fell down. It fell on them. It was the earthquake.� Tenar listened. She too had 
seen earthquake. �I tried to help!� said the boy in the old man�s voice, in pain. Then the gasping struggle to 
breathe began again. 

At first light Tenar was wakened by a sound she thought at first was the sea. It was a great rushing of 
wings. A flock of birds was flying over, low, so many that their wings stormed and the window was 
darkened by their quick shadows. It seemed they circled the house once and then were gone. They made no 
call or cry, and she did not know what birds they were. 

People came that morning from the village of Re Albi, which Ogion�s house stood apart from to the north. 
A goatgirl came, and a woman for the milk of Ogion�s goats, and others to ask what they might do for him. 
Moss, the village witch, fingered the alder stick and the hazel switch by the door and peered in hopefully, 
but not even she ventured to come in, and Ogion growled from his pallet, �Send �em away! Send �em all 
away!� 

He seemed stronger and more comfortable. When little Therru woke, he spoke to her in the dry, kind, 
quiet way Tenar remembered. The child went out to play in the sun, and he said to Tenar, �What is the name 
you call her?� 

He knew the True Language of the Making, but he had never learned any Kargish at all. 

�Therru means burning, the flaming of fire,� she said. 

�Ah, ah,� he said, and his eyes gleamed, and he frowned. He seemed to grope for words for a moment. 
�That one,� he said, �That one-they will fear her.� 

�They fear her now,� Tenar said bitterly. The mage shook his head. 


�Teach her, Tenar,� he whispered. �Teach her all!-Not Roke. They are afraid- Why did I let you go? Why 
did you go? To bring her here-too late?� 

�Be still, be still,� she told him tenderly, for he struggled with words and breath and could find neither. He 
shook his head, and gasped, �Teach her!� and lay still. 

He would not eat, and only drank a little water. In the middle of the day he slept. Waking in the late 
afternoon, he said, �Now, daughter,� and sat up. 

Tenar took his hand, smiling at him. 

 �Help me get up. 

 �No, no. 

 �Yes,� he said. �Outside. I can�t die indoors.� 

 �Where would you go?� 

�Anywhere. But if I could, the forest path,� he said. �The beech above the meadow.� 

When she saw he was able to get up and determined to get outdoors, she helped him. Together they got to 
the door, where he stopped and looked around the one room of his house. In the dark corner to the right of 
the doorway his tall staff leaned against the wall, shining a little. Tenar reached out to give it to him, but he 
shook his head. �No,� he said, �not that.� He looked around again as if for something missing, forgotten. 
�Come on,� he said at last. 

When the bright wind from the west blew on his face and he looked out at the high horizon, he said, 
�That�s good.� 

�Let me get some people from the village to make a litter and carry you,� she said. �They�re all waiting to 
do something for you.� 

�I want to walk,� the old man said. 

Therru came around the house and watched solemnly as Ogion and Tenar went, step by step, and stopping 
every five or six steps for Ogion to gasp, across the tangled meadow towards the woods that climbed steep 
up the mountainside from the inner side of the cliff-top. The sun was hot and the wind cold. It took them a 
very long time to cross that meadow. Ogion�s face was grey and his legs shook like the grass in the wind 
when they got at last to the foot of a big young beech tree just inside the forest, a few yards up the beginning 
of the mountain path. There he sank down between the roots of the tree, his back against its trunk. For a long 
time he could not move or speak, and his heart, pounding and faltering, shook his body. He nodded finally 
and whispered, �All right.� 

Therru had followed them at a distance. Tenar went to her and held her and talked to her a little. She came 
back to Ogion. �She�s bringing a rug,� she said. 

�Not cold.� 

�I�m cold.� 

There was the flicker of a smile on her face. 

The child came lugging a goat�s-wool blanket. She whispered to Tenar and ran off again. 

�Heather will let her help milk the goats, and look after her,� Tenar said to Ogion. �So I can stay here with 
you. 

�Never one thing, for you,� he said in the hoarse whistling whisper that was all the voice he had left. 

�No. Always at least two things, and usually more,� she said. �But I am here.� 

He nodded. 

For a long time he did not speak, but sat back against the 

tree trunk, his eyes closed. Watching his face, Tenar saw it change as slowly as the light changed in the west. 


He opened his eyes and gazed through a gap in the thickets at the western sky. He seemed to watch 
something, some act or deed, in that far, clear, golden space of light. He whispered once, hesitant, as if 
unsure, �The dragon-� 

The sun was down, the wind fallen. 

Ogion looked at Tenar. 

�Over,� he whispered with exultation. �All changed!- Changed, Tenar! Wait-wait here, for-� A shaking 
took his body, tossing him like the branch of a tree in a great wind. He gasped. His eyes closed and opened, 
gazing beyond her. He laid his hand on hers; she bent down to him; he spoke his name to her, so that after his 
death he might be truly known. 

He gripped her hand and shut his eyes and began once more the struggle to breathe, until there was no 
more breath. He lay then like one of the roots of the tree, while the stars came out and shone through the 
leaves and branches of the forest. 

Tenar sat with the dead man in the dusk and dark. A lantern gleamed like a firefly across the meadow. She 
had laid the woollen blanket across them both, but her hand that held his hand had grown cold, as if it held a 
stone. She touched her forehead to his hand once more. She stood up, stiff and dizzy, her body feeling 
strange to her, and went to meet and guide whoever was coming with the light. 

That night his neighbors sat with Ogion, and he did not send them away. 

 The mansion house of the Lord of Re Albi stood on an outcrop of rocks on the mountainside above the 
Overfell. Early in the morning, long before the sun had cleared the mountain, the wizard in the service of 
that lord came down through the village; and very soon after, another wizard came toiling up the steep road 
from Gont Port, having set out in darkness. Word had come to them that Ogion was dying, or their power 
was such that they knew of the passing of a great mage. 

The village of Re Albi had no sorcerer, only its mage, and a witchwoman to perform the lowly jobs of 
finding and mending and bonesetting, which people would not bother the mage with. Aunty Moss was a 
dour creature, unmarried, like most witches, and unwashed, with greying hair tied in curious charm-knots, 
and eyes red-rimmed from herb-smoke, It was she who had come across the meadow with the lantern, and 
with Tenar and the others she had watched the night by Ogion�s body. She had set a wax candle in a glass 
shade, there in the forest, and had burned sweet oils in a dish of clay; she had said the words that should be 
said, and done what should be done. When it came to touching the body to prepare it for burial, she had 
looked once at Tenar as if for permission, and then had gone on with her offices. Village witches usually saw 
to the homing, as they called it, of the dead, and often to the burial. 

When the wizard came down from the mansion house, a tall young man with a silvery staff of pinewood, 
and the other one came up from Gont Port, a stout middle-aged man with a short yew staff, Aunty Moss did 
not look at them with her bloodshot eyes, but ducked and bowed and drew back, gathering up her poor 
charms and witcheries. 

When she had laid out the corpse as it should lie to be buried, on the left side with the knees bent, she had 
put in the upturned left hand a tiny charm-bundle, something wrapped in soft goatskin and tied with colored 
cord. The wizard of Re Albi flicked it away with the tip of his staff. 

�Is the grave dug?� asked the wizard of Gont Port. 

�Yes,� said the wizard of Re Albi. �It is dug in the graveyard of my lord�s house,� and he pointed towards 
the mansion house up on the mountain. 

�I see,� said Gont Port. �I had thought our mage would be buried in all honor in the city he saved from 
earthquake.� 


�My lord desires the honor,� said Re Albi. �But it would seem-� Gont Port began, and stopped, not liking 
to argue, but not ready to give in to the young man�s easy claim. He looked down at the dead man. �He must 
be buried nameless,� he said with regret and bitterness. �I walked all night, but came too late. A great loss 
made greater!� 

The young wizard said nothing. 

�His name was Aihal,� Tenar said. �His wish was to lie here, where he lies now.� 

Both men looked at her. The young man, seeing a middle-aged village woman, simply turned away. The 
man from Gont Port stared a moment and said, �Who are you?� 

�I�m called Flint�s widow, Goha,� she said. �Who I am is your business to know, I think. But not mine to 
say. 

At this, the wizard of Re Albi found her worthy of a brief stare. �Take care, woman, how you speak to 
men of power!� 

�Wait, wait,� said Gont Port, with a patting gesture, trying to calm Re Albi�s indignation, and still gazing 
at Tenar. �You were-You were his ward, once?� 

 �And friend,� Tenar said. Then she turned away her head and stood silent. She had heard the anger in her 
voice as she said that word, �friend.� She looked down at her friend, a corpse ready for the ground, lost and 
still. They stood over him, alive and full of power, offering no friendship, only contempt, rivalry, anger. 

�I�m sorry,� she said. �It was a long night. I was with him when he died.� 

�It is not-� the young wizard began, but unexpectedly old Aunty Moss interrupted him, saying loudly, 
�She was. Yes, she was. Nobody else but her. He sent for her. He sent young Townsend the sheep-dealer to 
tell her come, clear down round the mountain, and he waited his dying till she did come and was with him, 
and then he died, and he died where he would be buried, here.� 

�And� said the older man, �-and he told you-?� 

�His name.� Tenar looked at them, and do what she would, the incredulity on the older man�s face, the 
contempt on the other�s, brought out an answering disrespect in her. �I said that name,� she said. �Must I 
repeat it to you?� 

To her consternation she saw from their expressions that in fact they had not heard the name, Ogion�s true 
name; they had not paid attention to her. 

�Oh!� she said. �This is a bad time-a time when even such a name can go unheard, can fall like a stone! Is 
listening not power? Listen, then: his name was Aihal. His name in death is Aihal, In the songs he will be 
known as Aihal of Gont. If there are songs to be made any more. He was a silent man. Now he�s very silent. 
Maybe there will be no songs, only silence. I don�t know. I�m very tired. I�ve lost my father and dear friend.� 
Her voice failed; her throat closed on a sob. She turned to go. She saw on the forest path the little 
charm-bundle Aunty Moss had made. She picked it up, knelt down by the corpse, kissed the open palm of 
the left hand, and laid the bundle on it. There on her knees she looked up once more at the two men. She 
spoke quietly. 

�Will you see to it,� she said, �that his grave is dug here, where he desired it?� 

First the older man, then the younger, nodded. She got up, smoothing down her skirt, and started back 
across the meadow in the morning light. 

 

 

 

 


Kalessin 

�Wait,� Ogion, who was Aihal now, had said to her, just before the wind of death had shaken him and torn 
him loose from living. �Over-all changed,� he had whispered, and then, �Tenar, wait-� But he had not said 
what she should wait for. The change he had seen or known, perhaps; but what change? Was it his own death 
he meant, his own life that was over? He had spoken with joy, exulting. He had charged her to wait. 

�What else have I to do?� she said to herself, sweeping the floor of his house. �What else have I ever 
done?� And, speaking to her memory of him, �Shall I wait here, in your house?� 

�Yes,� said Aihal the Silent, silently, smiling. 

So she swept out the house and cleaned the hearth and aired the mattresses. She threw out some chipped 
crockery and a leaky pan, but she handled them gently. She even put her cheek against a cracked plate as she 
took it out to the midden, for it was evidence of the old mage�s illness this past year. Austere he had been, 
living as plain as a poor farmer, but when his eyes were clear and his strength in him, he would never have 
used a broken plate or let a pan go unmended. These signs of his weakness grieved her, making her wish she 
had been with him to look after him. 

 �I would have liked that,� she said to her memory of him, but he said nothing. He never would have 
anybody to look after him but himself. Would he have said to her, �You have better things to do?� She did 
not know. He was silent. But that she did right to stay here in his house, now, she was certain. 

Shandy and her old husband, Clearbrook, who had been at the farm in Middle Valley longer than she 
herself had, would look after the flocks and the orchard; the other couple on the farm, Tiff and Sis, would get 
the field crops in. The rest would have to take care of itself for a while. Her raspberry canes would be picked 
by the neighborhood children. That was too bad; she loved raspberries. Up here on the Overfell, with the sea 
wind always blowing, it was too cold to grow raspberries. But Ogion�s little old peach tree in the sheltered 
nook of the house wall facing south bore eighteen peaches, and Therru watched them like a mousing cat till 
the day she came in and said in her hoarse, unclear voice, �Two of the peaches are all red and yellow.� 

�Ah,� said Tenar. They went together to the peach tree and picked the two first ripe peaches and ate them 
there, unpeeled. The juice ran down their chins. They licked their fingers. 

�Can I plant it?� said Therru, looking at the wrinkled stone of her peach. 

�Yes. This is a good place, near the old tree. But not too close. So they both have room for their roots and 
branches.� 

The child chose a place and dug the tiny grave. She laid the stone in it and covered it over. Tenar watched 
her. In the few days they had been living here, Therru had changed, she thought. She was still unresponsive, 
without anger, without joy; but since they had been here her awful vigilance, her immobility, had almost 
imperceptibly relaxed. She had desired the peaches. She had thought of planting the stone, of increasing the 
number of peaches in the world. At Oak Farm she was unafraid of two people only, Tenar and Lark; but here 
she had taken quite easily to Heather, the goatherd of Re Albi, a bawling-voiced, gentle lackwit of twenty, 
who treated the child very much as another goat, a lame kid. That was all right. And Aunty Moss was all 
right too, no matter what she smelled like. 

When Tenar had first lived in Re Albi, twenty-five years ago, Moss had not been an old witch but a young 
one. She had ducked and bowed and grinned at �the young lady,� �the White Lady,� Ogion�s ward and 
student, never speaking to her but with the utmost respect. Tenar had felt that respect to be false, a mask for 
an envy and dislike and distrust that were all too familiar to her from women over whom she had been 
placed in a position of superiority, women who saw themselves as common and her as uncommon, as 
privileged. Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan or foreign ward of the Mage of Gont, she was set apart, set 
above. Men had given her power, men had shared their power with her. Women looked at her from outside, 


sometimes rivalrous, often with a trace of ridicule. 

She had felt herself the one left outside, shut out. She had fled from the Powers of the desert tombs, and 
then she had left the powers of learning and skill offered her by her guardian, Ogion. She had turned her 
back on all that, gone to the other side, the other room, where the women lived, to be one of them. A wife, a 
farmer�s wife, a mother, a householder, undertaking the power that a woman was born to, the authority 
allotted her by the arrangements of mankind. 

And there in the Middle Valley, Flint�s wife, Goha, had 

been welcome, all in all, among the women; a foreigner to be sure, white-skinned and talking a bit strange, 
but a notable housekeeper, an excellent spinner, with well-behaved, well-grown children and a prospering 
farm: respectable. And among men she was Flint�s woman, doing what a woman should do: bed, breed, 
bake, cook, clean, spin, sew, serve. A good woman. They approved of her. Flint did well for himself after all, 
they said. I wonder what a white woman�s like, white all over? their eyes said, looking at her, until she got 
older and they no longer saw her. 

Here, now, it was all changed, there was none of all that. Since she and Moss had kept the vigil for Ogion 
together, the witch had made it plain that she would be her friend, follower, servant, whatever Tenar wanted 
her to be. Tenar was not at all sure what she wanted Aunty Moss to be, finding her unpredictable, unreliable, 
incomprehensible, passionate, ignorant, sly, and dirty. But Moss got on with the burned child. Perhaps it 
was Moss who was working this change, this slight easing, in Therru. With her, Therru behaved as with 
everyone-blank, unanswering, docile in the way an inanimate thing, a stone, is docile. But the old woman 
had kept at her, offering her little sweets and treasures, bribing, coaxing, wheedling. �Come with Aunty 
Moss now, dearie! Come along and Aunty Moss�ll show you the prettiest sight you ever saw. . . 

Moss�s nose leaned out over her toothless jaws and thin lips; there was a wart on her cheek the size of a 
cherry pit; her hair was a grey-black tangle of charm-knots and wisps; and she had a smell as strong and 
broad and deep and complicated as the smell of a fox�s den. �Come into the forest with me, dearie!� said the 
old witches in the tales told to the children of Gont. �Come with me and I�ll show you such a pretty sight!� 
And then the witch shut the child in her oven and baked it brown and ate it, or dropped it into her well, where 
it hopped and croaked dismally forever, or put it to sleep for a hundred years inside a great stone, till the 
King�s Son should come, the Mage Prince, to shatter the stone with a word, wake the maiden with a kiss, and 
slay the wicked witch. . . . 

�Come with me, dearie!� And she took the child into the fields and showed her a lark�s nest in the green 
hay, or into the marshes to gather white hallows, wild mint, and blueberries. She did not have to shut the 
child in an oven, or change hen into a monster, on seal her in stone. That had all been done already. 

She was kind to Therru, but it was a wheedling kindness, and when they were together it seemed that she 
talked to the child a great deal. Tenar did not know what Moss was telling or teaching hen, whether she 
should let the witch fill the child�s head with stuff. Weak as woman �s magic, wicked as woman�s magic, she 
had heard said a hundred times. And indeed she had seen that the witcheny of such women as Moss or Ivy 
was often weak in sense and sometimes wicked in intent or through ignorance. Village witches, though they 
might know many spells and charms and some of the great songs, were never trained in the High Arts on the 
principles of magery. No woman was so trained. Wizardry was a man�s work, a man�s skill; magic was 
made by men. There had never been a woman mage. Though some few had called themselves wizard or 
sorceress, their power had been untrained, strength without art or knowledge, half frivolous, half dangerous. 

The ordinary village witch, like Moss, lived on a few words of the True Speech handed down as great 
treasures from older witches on bought at high cost from sorcerers, and a supply of common spells of 


finding and mending, much meaningless ritual and mystery-making and jibberish, a solid experiential 
training in midwifery, bonesetting, and curing animal and human ailments, a good knowledge of herbs 
mixed with a mess of superstitions-all this built up on whatever native gift she might have of healing, 
chanting, changing, or spellcasting. Such a mixture might be a good one or a bad one. Some witches were 
fierce, bitter women, ready to do harm and knowing no reason not to do harm. Most were midwives and 
healers with a few love potions, fertility charms, and potency spells on the side, and a good deal of quiet 
cynicism about them. A few, having wisdom though no learning, used their gift purely for good, though they 
could not tell, as any prentice wizard could, the reason for what they did, and prate of the Balance and the 
Way of Power to justify their action or abstention. �I follow my heart,� one of these women had said to 
Tenar when she was Ogion�s ward and pupil. �Lord Ogion is a great mage. He does you great honor, 
teaching you. But look and see, child, if all he�s taught you isn�t finally to follow your heart.� 

Tenar had thought even then that the wise woman was right, and yet not altogether night; there was 
something left out of that. And she still thought so. 

Watching Moss with Therru now, she thought Moss was following her heart, but it was a dark, wild, queer 
heart, like a crow, going its own ways on its own errands. And she thought that Moss might be drawn to 
Therru not only by kindness but by Therru�s hurt, by the harm that had been done her: by violence, by fire. 

 Nothing Therru did or said, however, showed that she was learning anything from Aunty Moss except 
where the lark nested and the blueberries grew and how to make cat�s cradles one-handed. Thernu�s right 
hand had been so eaten by fire that it had healed into a kind of club, the thumb usable only as a pincer, like a 
crab�s claw. But Aunty Moss had an amazing set of cat�s cradles for four fingers and a thumb, and rhymes to 
go with the figures- 

Churn churn cherry all! 

Burn burn bury all.� 

Come, dragon, come! 

-and the string would form four triangles that flicked into a square. . . . Therru never sang aloud, but Tenar 
heard her whispering the chant under her breath as she made the figures, alone, sitting on the doorstep of the 
mage�s house. 

And, Tenar thought, what bond linked her, herself, to the child, beyond pity, beyond mere duty to the 
helpless? Lark would have kept her if Tenar had not taken her. But Tenar had taken her without ever asking 
herself why. Had she been following hen heart? Ogion had asked nothing about the child, but he had said, 
�They will fear her.� And Tenar had replied, �They do,� and truly. Maybe she herself feared the child, as she 
feared cruelty, and rape, and fire. Was fear the bond that held her? 

�Goha,� Therru said, sitting on her heels under the peach tree, looking at the place in the hard summer dirt 
where she had planted the peach stone, �what are dragons?� 

�Great creatures,� Tenar said, �like lizards, but longer than a ship-bigger than a house. With wings, like 


birds. They breathe out fire.� 

�Do they come here?� 

�No,� Tenar said. 

Therru asked no more. 

�Has Aunty Moss been telling you about dragons?� 

Therru shook her head. �You did,� she said. 

�Ah,� said Tenar. And presently, �The peach you planted will need water to grow. Once a day, till the 
rains come. 

Therru got up and trotted off around the corner of the house to the well. Her legs and feet were perfect, 
unhurt. Tenar liked to see her walk or run, the dank, dusty, pretty little feet on the earth. She came back with 
Ogion�s watering-jug, struggling along with it, and tipped out a small flood oven the new planting. 

�So you remember the story about when people and dragons were all the same. . . . It told how the humans 
came here, eastward, but the dragons all stayed in the far western isles. A long, long way away. 

Therru nodded. She did not seem to be paying attention, but when Tenar, saying �the western isles,� 
pointed out to the sea, Therru turned her face to the high, bright horizon glimpsed between staked 
bean-plants and the milking shed. 

A goat appeared on the roof of the milking shed and arranged itself in profile to them, its head nobly 
poised; apparently it considered itself to be a mountain goat. 

�Sippy�s got loose again,� said Tenar. 

�Hesssss! Hesssss!� went Thernu, imitating Heathen�s goat call; and Heathen herself appeared by the 
bean-patch fence, saying �Hesssss!� up at the goat, which ignored her, gazing thoughtfully down at the 
beans. 

Tenar left the three of them to play the catching-Sippy game. She wandered on past the bean patch 
towards the edge of the cliff and along it. Ogion�s house stood apart from the village and closer than any 
other house to the edge of the Ovenfell, here a steep, grassy slope broken by ledges and outcrops of rock, 
where goats could be pastured. As you went on north the drop grew even steeper, till it began to fall sheer; 
and on the path the rock of the great ledge showed through the soil, till a mile or so north of the village the 
Overfell had narrowed to a shelf of reddish sandstone hanging above the sea that undercut its base two 
thousand feet below. 

 Nothing grew at that far end of the Ovenfell but lichens and rockworts and here and there a blue daisy, 
wind-stunted, like a button dropped on the rough, crumbling stone. Inland of the cliff�s edge to the north and 
east, above a narrow strip of marshland the dark, tremendous side of Gont Mountain nose up, forested 
almost to the peak. The cliff stood so high above the bay that one must look down to see its outer shores and 
the vague lowlands of Essany. Beyond them, in all the south and west, there was nothing but the sky above 
the sea. 

Tenar had liked to go there in the years she had lived in Re Albi. Ogion had loved the forests, but she, 
who had lived in a desert where the only trees for a hundred miles were a gnarled orchard of peach and apple, 
hand watered in the endless summers, where nothing grew green and moist and easy, where there was 
nothing but a mountain and a great plain and the sky-she liked the cliff�s edge better than the enclosing 
woods. She liked having nothing at all over her head. 

The lichens, the grey rockwort, the stemless daisies, she liked them too; they were familiar. She sat down 
on the shelving rock a few feet from the edge and looked out to sea as she had used to do. The sun was hot 
but the ceaseless wind cooled the sweat on her face and arms. She leaned back on her hands and thought of 


nothing, sun and wind and sky and sea filling her, making her transparent to sun, wind, sky, sea. But her left 
hand reminded her of its existence, and she looked round to see what was scratching the heel of hen hand. It 
was a tiny thistle, crouched in a crack in the sandstone, barely lifting its colorless spikes into the light and 
wind. It nodded stiffly as the wind blew, resisting the wind, rooted in rock. She gazed at it for a long time. 

When she looked out to sea again she saw, blue in the blue haze where sea met sky, the line of an island: 
Orane�a, easternmost of the Inner Isles. 

She gazed at that faint dream-shape, dreaming, until a bird flying from the west over the sea drew her gaze. 
It was not a gull, for it flew steadily, and too high to be a pelican. Was it a wild goose, or an albatross, the 
great, rare voyager of the open sea, come among the islands? She watched the slow beat of the wings, far out 
and high in the dazzling air. Then she got to her feet, retreating a little from the cliff�s edge, and stood 
motionless, her heart going hard and hen breath caught in her throat, watching the sinuous, iron-dark body 
borne by long, webbed wings as red as fire, the out-reaching claws, the coils of smoke fading behind it in the 
air. 

 Straight to Gont it flew, straight to the Ovenfell, straight to her. She saw the glitter of rust-black scales 
and the gleam of the long eye. She saw the red tongue that was a tongue of flame. The stink of burning filled 
the wind, as with a hissing roar the dragon, turning to land on the shelf of rock, breathed out a sigh of fire. 

 Its feet clashed on the rock. The thorny tail, writhing, rattled, and the wings, scarlet where the sun shone 
through them, stormed and rustled as they folded down to the mailed flanks. The head turned slowly. The 
dragon looked at the woman who stood there within reach of its scythe-blade talons. The woman looked at 
the dragon. She felt the heat of its body. 

 She had been told that men must not look into a dragon�s eyes, but that was nothing to hen. It gazed 
straight at her from yellow eyes under armored canapaces wide-set above the narrow nose and flaring, 
fuming nostrils. And her small, soft face and dank eyes gazed straight at it. 

Neither of them spoke. 

The dragon turned its head aside a little so that she was not destroyed when it did speak, or perhaps it 
laughed-a great �Hah!� of orange flame. 

Then it lowered its body into a crouch and spoke, but not to her. 

�A hivaraihe, Ged,� it said, mildly enough, smokily, with a flicker of the burning tongue; and it lowered 
its head. 

Tenar saw for the first time, then, the man astride its back. In the notch between two of the high 
sword-thorns that rose in a now down its spine he sat, just behind the neck and above the shoulders where 
the wings had root. His hands were clenched on the rust-dark mail of the dragon�s neck and his head leaned 
against the base of the sword-thorn, as if he were asleep. 

�A hi eheraihe, Ged!� said the dragon, a little louder, its long mouth seeming always to smile, showing 
the teeth as long as Tenan�s forearm, yellowish, with white, sharp tips. 

The man did not stir. 

The dragon turned its long head and looked again at Tenar. 

�Sobriost,� it said, in a whisper of steel sliding over steel. 

That word of the Language of the Making she knew. Ogion had taught her all she would learn of that 
tongue. Go up, the dragon said: mount! And she saw the steps to mount. The taloned foot, the crooked elbow, 
the shoulderjoint, the first musculature of the wing: four steps. 

She too said, �Hah!� but not in a laugh, only trying to get her breath, which kept sticking in her throat; and 
she lowered hen head a moment to stop her dizzy faintness. 


Then she went forward, past the talons and the long lipless mouth and the long yellow eye, and mounted the 
shoulder of the dragon. She took the man�s arm. He did not move, but surely he was not dead, for the dragon 
had brought him here and spoken to him. �Come on,� she said, and then seeing his face as she loosened the 
clenched grip of his left hand, �Come on, Ged. Come on. . . . 

He raised his head a little. His eyes were open, but unseeing. She had to climb around him, scratching hen 
legs on the hot, mailed hide of the dragon, and unclench his right hand from a horny knob at the base of the 
sword-thorn. She got him to take hold of her arms, and so could carry-drag him down those four strange 
stairs to earth. 

He roused enough to try to hold on to hen, but there was no strength in him. He sprawled off the dragon 
onto the rock like a sack unloaded, and lay there. 

The dragon turned its immense head and in a completely animal gesture nosed and sniffed at the man�s 
body. 

It lifted its head, and its wings too half lifted with a vast, metallic sound. It shifted its feet away from Ged, 
closer to the edge of the cliff. Turning back the head on the thorned neck, it stared once more directly at 
Tenar, and its voice like the dry roar of a kiln-fire spoke: �Thesse Kalessin.� 

The sea wind whistled in the dragon�s half-open wings. �Thesse Tenar,� the woman said in a clean, 
shaking voice. The dragon looked away, westward, over the sea. It twitched its long body with a clink and 
clash of iron scales, then abruptly opened its wings, crouched, and leapt straight out from the cliff onto the 
wind. The dragging tail scored the sandstone as it passed. The red wings beat down, lifted, and beat down, 
and already Kalessin was fan from land, flying straight, flying west. 

Tenar watched it till it was no larger than a wild goose or a gull. The air was cold. When the dragon had been 
there it had been hot, furnace-hot, with the dragon�s inward fire. Tenar shivered. She sat down on the rock 
beside Ged and began to cry. She hid her face in her arms and wept aloud. �What can I do?� she cried. 
�What can I do now?� 

Presently she wiped hen eyes and nose on hen sleeve, put back her hair with both hands, and turned to the 
man who lay beside her. He lay so still, so easy on the bare rock, as if he might lie there forever. 

Tenar sighed. There was nothing she could do, but there was always the next thing to be done. 

She could not carry him. She would have to get help. That meant leaving him alone. It seemed to her that 
he was too near the cliff�s edge. If he tried to get up he might fall, weak and dizzy as he would be. How could 
she move him? He did not rouse at all when she spoke and touched him. She took him under the shoulders 
and tried to pull him, and to her surprise succeeded; dead weight as he was, the weight was not much. 
Resolute, she dragged him ten on fifteen feet inland, off the bane rock shelf onto a bit of dirt, where dry 
bunchgrass gave some illusion of shelter. There she had to leave him. She could not run, for her legs shook 
and her breath still came in sobs. She walked as fast as she could to Ogion�s house, calling out as she 
approached it to Heather, Moss, and Thenru. 

The child appeared around the milking shed and stood, as her way was, obedient to Tenar�s call but not 
coming forward to greet or be greeted . 

�Therru, run into town and ask anyone to come-anybody strong- There�s a man hurt on the cliff.� 

Therru stood there. She had never gone alone into the village. She was frozen between obedience and fear. 
Tenan saw that and said, �Is Aunty Moss here? Is Heather? The 

three of us can carry him. Only, quick, quick, Therru!� She felt that if she let Ged lie unprotected there he 
would surely die. He would be gone when she came back-dead, fallen, taken by dragons. Anything could 
happen. She must hurry before it happened. Flint had died of a stroke in his fields and she had not been with 


him. He had died alone. The shepherd had found him lying by the gate. Ogion had died and she could not 
keep him from dying, she could not give him breath. Ged had come home to die and it was the end of 
everything, there was nothing left, nothing to be done, but she must do it. �Quick, Therru! Bring anyone!� 

She started shakily towards the village herself, but saw old Moss hurrying across the pasture, stumping 
along with her thick hawthorn stick. �Did you call me, dearie?� 

Moss�s presence was an immediate relief. She began to get her breath and be able to think. Moss wasted 
no time in questions, but hearing there was a man hurt who must be moved, got the heavy canvas 
mattress-cover that Tenar had been airing, and lugged it out to the end of the Over-fell. She and Tenan rolled 
Ged onto it and were dragging this conveyance laboriously homeward when Heathen came trotting along, 
followed by Therru and Sippy. Heathen was young and strong, and with hen help they could lift the canvas 
like a litter and canny the man to the house. 

Tenar and Therru slept in the alcove in the west wall of the long single room. There was only Ogion�s bed 
at the fan end, covered now with a heavy linen sheet. There they laid the man. Tenar put Ogion�s blanket 
over him, while Moss muttered charms around the bed, and Heather and Therru stood and stared . 

�Let him be now,� said Tenar, leading them all to the front pant of the house. 

�Who is he?� Heather asked. 

 �What was he doing on the Overfell?� Moss asked. 

 �You know him, Moss. He was Ogion�s-Aihal�s prentice, once. 

 The witch shook her head. �That was the lad from Ten Alders, dearie,� she said. �The one that�s 
Anchmage in Roke, now.� 

 Tenan nodded. 

 �No, dearie,� said Moss. �This looks like him. But isn�t him. This man�s no mage. Not even a sorcerer.� 

 Heathen looked from one to the other, entertained. She did not understand most things people said, but 
she liked to hear them say them. 

 �But I know him, Moss. It�s Sparrowhawk.� Saying the name, Ged�s use-name, released a tenderness in 
her, so that for the first time she thought and felt that this was he indeed, and that all the years since she had 
first seen him were their bond. She saw a light like a star in darkness, underground, long ago, and his face in 
the light. �I know him, Moss.� She smiled, and then smiled more broadly. �He�s the first man I ever saw,� 
she said. 

 Moss mumbled and shifted. She did not like to contradict �Mistress Goha,� but she was perfectly 
unconvinced. �There�s tricks, disguises, transformations, changes,� she said. �Better be careful, dearie. 
How did he get where you found him, away out there? Did any see him come through the village?� 

 �None of you-saw-?� 

 They stared at her. She tried to say �the dragon� and could not. Her lips and tongue would not form the 
word. But a word formed itself with them, making itself with her mouth and breath. �Kalessin,� she 
said. 

 Therru was staring at her. A wave of warmth, heat, seemed to flow from the child, as if she were in fever. 
She said nothing, but moved her lips as if repeating the name, and that fever heat burned around her. 

 �Tricks!� Moss said. �Now that our mage is gone there�ll be all kinds of tnicksters coming round.� 

 �I came from Atuan to Havnon, from Havnor to Gont, with Sparnowhawk, in an open boat,� Tenar said 
drily. 

 �You saw him when he brought me here, Moss. He wasn�t archmage then. But he was the same, the same 
man. Are there other scars like those?� 


 Confronted, the olden woman became still, collecting herself. She glanced at Therru. �No,� she said. 
�But-� 

 �Do you think I wouldn�t know him?� 

 Moss twisted her mouth, frowned, rubbed one thumb with the other, looking at hen hands. 
�There�s evil things in the world, mistress,� she said. �A thing that takes a man�s form and body, but his 
soul�s gone-eaten- �The gebbeth?� 

 Moss cringed at the word spoken openly. She nodded. 

 �They do say, once the mage Sparrowhawk came here, long ago, before you came with him. And a thing 
of dankness came with him-following him. Maybe it still does. Maybe-� 

 �The dragon who brought him here,� Tenar said, �called him by his true name. And I know that name. 
Wrath at the witch�s obstinate suspicion rang in hen voice. 

 Moss stood mute. Her silence was better argument than her words. 

 �Maybe the shadow on him is his death,� Tenan said. �Maybe he�s dying. I don�t know. If Ogion-� 

 At the thought of Ogion she was in tears again, thinking how Ged had come too late. She swallowed the 
tears and went to the woodbox for kindling for the fire. She gave Therru the kettle to fill, touching hen face 
as she spoke to her. The seamed and slabby scars were hot to touch, but the child was not feverish. Tenar 
knelt to make the fire. Somebody in this fine household-a witch, a widow, a cripple, and a half-wit-had to do 
what must be done, and not frighten the child with weeping. But the dragon was gone, and was there nothing 
to come any more but death? 

 

 

 

 

Bettering 

He lay like the dead but was not dead. Where had he been? What had he come through? That night, in 
firelight, Tenar took the stained, worn, sweat-stiffened clothes off him. She washed him and let him lie 
naked between the linen sheet and the blanket of soft, heavy goat�s-wool. Though a short, slight-built man, 
he had been compact, vigorous; now he was thin as if worn down to the bone, worn away, fragile. Even the 
scars that ridged his shoulder and the left side of his face from temple to jaw seemed lessened, silvery. And 
his hair was grey. 

 I�m sick of mourning, Tenar thought. Sick of mourning, sick of grief. I will not grieve for him Didn�t he 
come to me riding the dragon? Once I meant to kill him, she thought. Now I�ll make him 

live, if I can. She looked at him then with a challenge in her eye, and no pity. 

 �Which of us saved the other from the Labyrinth, Ged?� 

 Unhearing, unmoving, he slept. She was very tired. She bathed in the water she had heated to wash him 
with, and crept into bed beside the little, warm, silky silence that was Therru asleep. She slept, and her sleep 
opened out into a vast windy space hazy with rose and gold. She flew. Her voice called, �Kalessin!� A voice 
answered, calling from the gulfs of light. 

When she woke, the birds were chirping in the fields and on the roof. Sitting up she saw the light of 
morning through the gnarled glass of the low window looking west. There was something in her, some seed 
or glimmer, too small to look at or think about, new. Therru was still asleep. Tenar sat by her looking out the 
small window at cloud and sunlight, thinking of her daughter Apple, trying to remember Apple as a baby. 


Only the faintest glimpse, vanishing as she turned to it-the small, fat body shaking with a laugh, the wispy, 
flying hair..., And the second baby, Spark he got called as a joke, because he�d been struck off Flint. She did 
not know his true name. He had been as sickly a child as Apple had been a sound one. Born early and very 
small, he had nearly died of the croup at two months, and for two years after that it had been like rearing a 
fledgling sparrow, you never knew if he would be alive in the morning. But he held on, the little spark 
wouldn�t go out. And growing, he became a wiry boy, endlessly active, driven; no use on the farm; no 
patience with animals, plants, people; using words for his needs only, never for pleasure and the give and 
take of love and knowledge. 

Ogion had come by on his wanderings when Apple was thirteen and Spark eleven. Ogion had named 
Apple then, in the springs of the Kaheda at the valley�s head; beautiful she had walked in the green water, 
the woman-child, and he had given her her true name, Hayohe. He had stayed on at Oak Farm a day or two, 
and had asked the boy if he wanted to go wandering a little with him in the forests. Spark merely shook his 
head. �What would you do if you could?� the mage had asked him, and the boy said what he had never been 
able to say to father or mother: �Go to sea. 

after Beech gave him his true name, three years later, he shipped as a sailor aboard a merchantman 
trading from Valmouth to Orane�a and North Havnor. From time to time he would come to the farm, but not 
often and never for long, though at his father�s death it would be his property. He was white-skinned like 
Tenar, but grew tall like Flint, with a narrow face. He had not told his parents his true name. There might 
never be anyone he told it to. Tenar had not seen him for three years now. He might or might not know of his 
father�s death. He might be dead himself, drowned, but she thought not. He would carry that spark his life 
over the waters, through the storms. 

That was what it was like in her now, a spark; like the bodily certainty of a conception; a change, a new 
thing. What it was she would not ask. You did not ask. You did not ask a true name. It was given you, or not. 

She got up and dressed. Early as it was, it was warm, and she built no fire. She sat in the doorway to drink 
a cup of milk and watch the shadow of Gont Mountain draw inward from the sea. There was as little wind as 
there could be on this air-swept shelf of rock, and the breeze had a midsummer feel, soft and rich, smelling 
of the meadows. There was a sweetness in the air, a change. 

�All changed!� the old man had whispered, dying, joyful. Laying his hand on hers, giving her the gift, his 
name, giving it away. 

�Aihal!� she whispered. For answer a couple of goats bleated, out behind the milking shed, waiting for 
Heather to come. �Be-eh,� one said, and the other, deeper, metallic, �Bla-ah! Bla-ah!� Trust a goat, Flint 
used to say, to spoil anything. Flint, a shepherd, had disliked goats. But Sparrowhawk had been a goatherd, 
here across the mountain, as a boy. 

She went inside. She found Therru standing gazing at the sleeping man. She put her arm around the child, 
and though Therm usually shrank from or was passive to touch or caress, this time she accepted it and 
perhaps even leaned a little to Tenar. 

Ged lay in the same exhausted, overwhelmed sleep. His face was turned to expose the four white scars 
that marked it. 

�Was he burned?� Therru whispered. 

Tenar did not answer at once. She did not know what those scars were. She had asked him long ago, in 
the Painted Room of the Labyrinth of Atuan, jeering: �A dragon?� And he had answered seriously, �Not a 
dragon. One of the kinship of the Nameless Ones; but I learned his name.... And that was all she knew. But 
she knew what �burned� meant to the child. 


�Yes,� she said. 

Therru continued to gaze at him. She had cocked her head to bring her one seeing eye to bear, which 
made her look like a little bird, a sparrow or a finch. 

�Come along, finchling, birdlet, sleep�s what he needs, you need a peach. Is there a peach ripe this 
morning?� 

Therru trotted out to see, and Tenar followed her. 

Eating her peach, the child studied the place where she had planted the peach pit yesterday. She was 
evidently disappointed that no tree had grown there, but she said nothing. 

�Water it,� said Tenar. 

 Aunty Moss arrived in the midmorning. One of her skills as a witch-handywoman was basket making, 
using the rushes of Overfell Marsh, and Tenar had asked her to teach her the art. As a child in Atuan, Tenar 
had learned how to learn. As a stranger in Gont, she had found that people 

liked to teach. She had learned to be taught and so to be accepted, her foreignness forgiven. 

Ogion had taught her his knowledge, and then Flint had taught her his. It was her habit of life, to learn. There 
seemed always to be a great deal to be learned, more than she would have believed when she was a 
prentice-priestess or the pupil of a mage. 

The rushes had been soaking, and this morning they were to split them, an exacting but not a complicated 
business, leaving plenty of attention to spare. 

�Aunty,� said Tenar as they sat on the doorstep with the bowl of soaking rushes between them and a mat 
before them to lay the split ones on, �how do you tell if a man�s a wizard or not?� 

Moss�s reply was circuitous, beginning with the usual gnomics and obscurities. �Deep knows deep,� she 
said, deeply, and �What�s born will speak,� and she told a story about the ant that picked up a tiny end of 
hair from the floor of a palace and ran off to the ants� nest with it, and in the night the nest glowed 
underground like a star, for the hair was from the head of the great mage Brost, But only the wise could see 
the glowing anthill. To common eyes it was all dark. 

�One needs training, then,� said Tenar. 

Maybe, maybe not, was the gist of Moss�s dark reply. �Some are born with that gift,� she said. �Even 
when they don�t know it, it will be there. Like the hair of the mage in the hole in the ground, it will shine.� 

�Yes,� said Tenar. �I�ve seen that.� She split and resplit a reed cleanly and laid the splints on the mat. 
�How do you know, then, when a man is not a wizard?� 

�It�s not there,� Moss said, �it�s not there, dearie. The power. See now. If I�ve got eyes in my head I can 
see that you have eyes, can�t I? And if you�re blind I�ll see that. And if you�ve only got one eye, like the little 
one, or if you�ve got three, I�ll see �em, won�t I? But if I don�t have an eye to see with, I won�t know if you 
do till you tell me. But I do. I see, I know. The third eye!� She touched her forehead and gave a loud, dry 
chuckle, like a hen triumphant over an egg. She was pleased with having found the words to say what she 
wanted to say. A good deal of her obscurity and cant, Tenar had begun to realize, was mere ineptness with 
words and ideas. Nobody had ever taught her to think consecutively. Nobody had ever listened to what she 
said. All that was expected, all that was wanted of her was muddle, mystery, mumbling. She was a 
witchwoman. She had nothing to do with clear meaning. 

�I understand,� Tenar said. �Then-maybe this is a question you don�t want to answer-then when you look 
at a person with your third eye, with your power, you see their power-or don�t see it?� 

�It�s more a knowing,� Moss said. �Seeing is just a way of saying it. �Tisn�t like I see you, I see this rush, 
I see the mountain there. It�s a knowing. I know what�s in you and not in that poor hollow-headed Heather, 


I know what�s in the dear child and not in him in yonder. I know-� She could not get any farther with it. She 
mumbled and spat. �Any witch worth a hairpin knows another witch!� she said finally, plainly, impatiently. 

�You recognize each other.� 

Moss nodded. �Aye, that�s it. That�s the word. Recognize.� 

�And a wizard would recognize your power, would know you for a sorceress-� 

But Moss was grinning at her, a black cave of a grin in a cobweb of wrinkles. �Dearie,� she said, �a man, 
you mean, a wizardly man? What�s a man of power to do with us?� 

 �But Ogion-� 

 �Lord Ogion was kind,� Moss said, without irony. 

 They split rushes for a while in silence. 

 �Don�t cut your thumb on �em, dearie,� Moss said. 

 �Ogion taught me. As if I weren�t a girl. As if I�d been his prentice, like Sparrowhawk. He taught me the 
Language of the Making, Moss. What I asked him, he told me.� 

�There wasn�t no other like him.� 

�It was I who wouldn�t be taught. I left him. What did I I want with his books? What good were they to me? 
I 

wanted to live, I wanted a man, I wanted my children, I wanted my life.� 

She split reeds neatly, quickly, with her nail. 

�And I got it,� she said. 

�Take with the right hand, throw away with the left,� the witch said. �Well, dearie mistress, who�s to say? 
Who�s to say? Wanting a man got me into awful troubles more than once. But wanting to get married, never! 
No, no. None of that for me. 

�Why not?� Tenar demanded. 

Taken aback, Moss said simply, �Why, what man�d marry a witch?� And then, with a sidelong chewing 
motion of her jaw, like a sheep shifting its cud, �And what witch�d marry a man?� 

They split rushes. 

�What�s wrong with men?� Tenar inquired cautiously. 

As cautiously, lowering her voice, Moss replied, �I don�t know, my dearie. I�ve thought on it. Often I�ve 
thought on it. The best I can say it is like this. A man�s in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell.� She held up her 
long, bent, wet fingers as if holding a walnut. �It�s hard and strong, that shell, and it�s all full of him. Full of 
grand man-meat, manself. And that�s all. That�s all there is. It�s all him and nothing else, inside.� 

Tenar pondered awhile and finally asked, �But if he�s a wizard-� 

�Then it�s all his power, inside. His power�s himself, see. That�s how it is with him. And that�s all. When 
his power goes, he�s gone. Empty.� She cracked the unseen walnut and tossed the shells away. �Nothing.� 

�And a woman, then?� 

�Oh, well, dearie, a woman�s a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? 
Listen, mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising 
of the lands. I go back into the dark.� Moss�s eyes shone with a weird brightness in their red rims and her 
voice sang like an instrument. �I go back into the dark! Before the moon I was. No one knows, no one knows, 
no one can say what I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman�s power, deeper than the roots of 
trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. Who dares ask questions 
of the dark? Who�ll ask the dark its name?� 

The old woman was rocking, chanting, lost in her incantation; but Tenar sat upright, and split a reed down 


the center with her thumbnail. 

�I will,� she said. She split another reed. 

�I lived long enough in the dark,� she said. 

 She looked in from time to time to see that Sparrowhawk was still sleeping. She did so now. When she sat 
down again with Moss, wanting not to return to what they had been 

saying, for the older woman looked dour and sullen, she said, �This morning when I woke up I felt, oh, as if 
a new wind were blowing. A change. Maybe just the weather. Did you feel that?� 

But Moss would not say yes or no. �Many a wind blows here on the Overfell, some good, some ill. Some 
bears clouds and some fair weather, and some brings news to those who can hear it, but those who won�t 
listen can�t hear. Who am I to know, an old woman without mage~learning, without book~learning? All my 
learning�s in the earth, in the dark earth. Under their feet, the proud ones. Under their feet, the proud lords 
and mages. Why should they look down, the learned ones? What does an old witch-woman know?� 

She would be a formidable enemy, Tenar thought, and was a difficult friend. 

�Aunty,� she said, taking up a reed, �I grew up among women. Only women, In the Kargish lands, far 
east, in Atuan, I was taken from my family as a little child to be brought up a priestess in a place in the desert. 
I don�t know what name it has, all we called it in our language was just that, the place. The only place I knew. 
There were a few soldiers guarding it, but they couldn�t come inside the walls. And we couldn�t go outside 
the walls. Only in a group, all women and girls, with eunuchs guarding us, keeping the men out of sight.� 

�What�s those you said?� 

�Eunuchs?� Tenar had used the Kargish word without thinking. �Gelded men,� she said. 

The witch stared, and said, �Tsekh!� and made the sign to avert evil. She sucked her lips. She had been 
startled out of her resentment. 

 �One of them was the nearest to a mother I had there.. . , But do you see, Aunty, I never saw a man till I 
was a woman grown. Only girls and women. And yet I didn�t know what women are, because women were 
all I did know. Like men who live among men, sailors, and soldiers, and mages on Roke-do they know what 
men are? How can they, if they never speak to a woman?� 

�Do they take �em and do �em like rams and he-goats,� said Moss, �like that, with a gelding knife?� 

Horror, the macabre, and a gleam of vengeance had won out over both anger and reason. Moss didn�t 
want to pursue any topic but that of eunuchs. 

Tenar could not tell her much. She realized that she had never thought about the matter. When she was a 
girl in Atuan, there had been gelded men; and one of them had loved her tenderly, and she him; and she had 
killed him to escape from him. Then she had come to the Archipelago, where there were no eunuchs, and 
had forgotten them, sunk them in darkness with Manan�s body. 

�I suppose,� she said, trying to satisfy Moss�s craving for details, �that they took young boys, and-� But 
she stopped. Her hands stopped working. 

�Like Therru,� she said after a long pause. �What�s a child for? What�s it there for? To be used. To be 
raped, to be gelded- Listen, Moss. When I lived in the dark places, that was what they did there. And when I 
came here, I thought I�d come out into the light, I learned the true words. And I had my man, I bore my 
children, I lived well. In the broad daylight, And in the broad daylight, they did that-to the child. In the 
meadows by the river. The river that rises from the spring where Ogion named my daughter. In the sunlight. 
I am trying to find out where I can live, Moss. Do you know what I mean? What I�m trying to say?� 

�Well, well,� the older woman said; and after a while, 

�Dearie, there�s misery enough without going looking for it.� And seeing Tenar�s hands shake as she tried to 


split a stubborn reed, she said, again, �Don�t cut your thumb on �em, dearie. � 

 It was not till the next day that Ged roused at all. Moss, who was very skillful though appallingly unclean 
as a nurse, had succeeded in spooning some meat-broth into him. �Starving,� she said, �and dried up with 
thirst. Wherever he was, they didn�t do much eating and drinking.� And after appraising him again, �He�ll 
be too far gone already, I think. They get weak, see, and can�t even drink, though it�s all they need. I�ve 
known a great strong man to die like that. All in a few days, shriveled to a shadow, like.� 

But through relentless patience she got a few spoonfuls of her brew of meat and herbs into him. �Now 
we�ll see,� she said. �Too late, I guess. He�s slipping away.� She spoke without regret, perhaps with relish. 
The man was nothing to her; a death was an event. Maybe she could bury this mage. They had not let her 
bury the old one. 

Tenar was salving his hands, the next day, when he woke. He must have ridden long on Kalessin�s back, 
for his fierce grip on the iron scales had scoured the skin off his palms, and the inner side of the fingers was 
cut and recut. Sleeping, he kept his hands clenched as if they would not let go the absent dragon. She had to 
force his fingers open gently to wash and salve the sores. As she did that, he cried out and started, reaching 
out, as if he felt himself falling. His eyes opened. She spoke quietly. He looked at her. 

�Tenar,� he said without smiling, in pure recognition beyond emotion. And it gave her pure pleasure, like 
a sweet flavor or a flower, that there was still one man living who knew her name, and that it was this man. 

She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. �Lie still,� she said. �Let me finish this. � He obeyed, drifting 
back into sleep soon, this time with his hands open and relaxed. 

Later, falling asleep beside Therru in the night, she thought, But I never kissed him before, And the 
thought shook her. At first she disbelieved it. Surely, in all the years- Not in the Tombs, but after, traveling 
together in the mountains- In Lookfar, when they sailed together to Havnor- When he brought her here to 
Gont-? 

No. Nor had Ogion ever kissed her, or she him. He had called her daughter, and had loved her, but had 
not touched her; and she, brought up as a solitary, untouched priestess, a holy thing, had not sought touch, or 
had not known she sought it. She would lean her forehead or her cheek for a moment on Ogion�s open hand, 
and he might stroke her hair, once, very lightly. 

And Ged never even that. 

Did I never think of it? she asked herself in a kind of incredulous awe. 

She did not know. As she tried to think of it, a horror, a sense of transgression, came on her very strongly, 
and then died away, meaningless. Her lips knew the slightly rough, dry, cool skin of his cheek near the 
mouth on the right side, and only that knowledge had importance, was of weight. 

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, prop- 

ping 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 toRoke. 
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 Hay-nor,� 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. 

�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 any-. thing. 

�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? 

 

 

 

 

 

Worsening 

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 farmer�s 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 wizard�s 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 a 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. It�s 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 dragon�s 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 

�What do you call that star? The white one, up high.� 

�The Heart of the Swan,� he said, looking up at it. �In Ten Alders they called it the Arrow.� 

 But he did not say its name in the Language of the Making, nor the true names the witch had taught him of 
hawk, falcon, sparrowhawk. 

�What I said-in there-was wrong,� he said softly. �I shouldn�t speak at all. Forgive me. 

�If you won�t speak, what can I do but leave you?� She turned to him. �Why do you think only of yourself? 
always of yourself? Go outside awhile,� she told him, wrathful. �I want to go to bed.� 

Bewildered, muttering some apology, he went out; and she, going to the alcove, slipped out of her clothes 
and into the bed, and hid her face in the sweet warmth of Therru�s silky nape. 

�Knowing what her life must be . . . � 

Her anger with him, her stupid denial of the truth of what he told her, rose from disappointment. Though 
Lark had said ten times over that nothing could be done, yet she had hoped that Tenar could heal the burns; 
and for all her saying that even Ogion could not have done it, Tenar had hoped that Ged could heal 
Therru-could lay his hand on the scar and it would be whole and well, the blind eye bright, the clawed hand 
soft, the ruined life intact. 

�Knowing what her life must be . . . � 

The averted faces, the signs against evil, the horror and curiosity, the sickly pity and the prying threat, for 
harm draws harm to it . . . And never a man�s arms. Never anyone to hold her. Never anyone but Tenar. Oh, he 
was right, the child should have died, should be dead. They should have let her go into that dry land, she and 


Lark and Ivy, meddling old women, softhearted and cruel. He was right, he was always right. But then, the 
men who had used her for their needs and games, the woman who had suffered her to be used-they had been 
quite right to beat her unconscious and push her into the fire to burn to death. Only they had not been 
thorough. They had lost their nerve, they had left some life in her. That had been wrong. And everything she, 
Tenar, had done was wrong. She had been given to the dark powers as a child: she had been eaten by them, 
she had been suffered to be eaten. Did she think that by crossing the sea, by learning other languages, by 
being a man s wife, a mother of children, that by merely living her life, she could ever be anything but what 
she was-their servant, their food, theirs to use for their needs and games? Destroyed, she had drawn the 
destroyed to her, part of her own ruin, the body of her own evil. 

The child�s hair was fine, warm, sweet-smelling. She lay curled up in the warmth of Tenar�s arms, 
dreaming. What wrong could she be? Wronged, wronged beyond all repair, but not wrong. Not lost, not lost, 
not lost. Tenar held her and lay still and set her mind on the light of her dreaming, the gulfs of bright air, the 
name of the dragon, the name of the star, Heart of the Swan, the Arrow, Tehanu. 

 

She was combing the black goat for the fine underwool that she would spin and take to a weaver to make 
into cloth, the silky �fleecefell� of Gont Island. The old black goat had been combed a thousand times, and 
liked it, leaning into the dig and pull of the wire comb-teeth. The grey-black combings grew into a soft, dirty 
cloud, which Tenar at last stuffed into a net bag; she worked some burrs out of the fringes of the goat�s ears 
by way of thanks, and slapped her barrel flank companionably. �Bah!� the goat said, and trotted off. Tenar 
let herself out of the fenced pasture and came around in front of the house, glancing over the meadow to 
make sure Therru was still playing there. 

 Moss had shown the child how to weave grass baskets, and clumsy as her crippled hand was, she had 
begun to get the trick of it. She sat there in the meadow grass with her work on her lap, but she was not 
working. She was watching Sparrowhawk. 

He stood a good way off, nearer the cliff�s edge. His back was turned, and he did not know anyone was 
watching him, for he was watching a bird, a young kestrel; and she in turn was watching some small prey 
she had glimpsed in the grass. She hung beating her wings, wanting to flush the vole or mouse, to panic it 
into a rush to its nest. The man stood, as intent, as hungry, gazing at the bird. Slowly he lifted his right hand, 
holding the forearm level, and he seemed to speak, though the wind bore his words away. The kestrel veered, 
crying her high, harsh, keening cry, and shot up and off toward the forests. 

The man lowered his arm and stood still, watching the bird. The child and the woman were still. Only the 
bird flew, went free. 

saw the hawk; saw the man; saw the birds come to him, come at his word, at his naming them, come beating 
their wings to hold his arm with their fierce talons; saw herself the hawk, the wild bird. 

 �He came to me once as a falcon, a pilgrim falcon,� Ogion had said, by the fire, on a winter day. He had 
been telling her of the spells of Changing, of transformations, of the mage Bordger who had become a bear. 
�He flew to me, to my wrist, out of the north and west. I brought him in by the fire here. He could not speak. 
Because I knew him, I was able to help him; he could put off the falcon, and be a man again, But there was 
always some hawk in him. They called him Sparrowhawk in his village because the wild hawks would come 
to him, at his word. Who are we? What is it to be a man? Before he had his name, before he had knowledge, 
before he had power, the hawk was in him, and the man, and the mage, and more-he was what we cannot 
name. And so are we all.� 

The girl sitting at the hearth, gazing at the fire, listening, 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mice 

Townsend, the sheep-buyer who had brought Ogion�s message to the farm in Middle Valley, came out one 
afternoon to the mage�s house. 

�Will you be selling the goats, now Lord Ogion�s gone?� 

�I might,� Tenar said neutrally. She had in fact been wondering how, if she stayed in Re Albi, she would 
get on. Like any wizard, Ogion had been supported by the people his skills and powers served-in his case, 
anyone on Gont. He had only to ask and what he needed would be given gratefully, a good bargain for the 
goodwill of a mage; but he never had to ask. Rather he had to give away the excess of food and raiment and 
tools and livestock and all necessities and ornaments that were offered or simply left on his doorstep. �What 
shall I do with them?� he would demand, perplexed, standing with his arms full of indignant, squawking 
chickens, or yards of tapestry, or pots of pickled beets. 

 But Tenar had left her living in the Middle Valley. She had not thought when she left so suddenly of how 
long she might stay. She had not brought with her the seven pieces of ivory, Flint�s hoard; nor would that 
money have been of use in the village except to buy land or livestock, or deal with some trader up from Gont 
Port peddling pellawi furs or silks of Lorbanery to the rich farmers and little lords of Gont. Flint�s farm gave 
her all she and Therru needed to eat and wear; but Ogion�s six goats and his beans and onions had been for 
his pleasure rather than his need. She had been living off his larder, the gifts of villagers who gave to her for 
his sake, and the generosity of Aunty Moss. Just yesterday the witch had said, �Dearie, my ringneck hen�s 
brood�s hatched out, and I�ll bring you two-three chickies when they begin to scratch. The mage wouldn�t 
keep �em, too noisy and silly, he said, but what�s a house without chickies at the door?� 

Indeed her hens wandered in and out of Moss�s door freely, and slept on her bed, and enriched the smells 
of the dark, smoky, reeking room beyond belief. 

�There�s a brown-and-white yearling nanny will make a fine milch goat,� Tenar said to the sharp-faced 
man. 

�I was thinking of the whole lot,� he said. �Maybe. Only five or six of �em, right?� 

�Six. They�re in the pasture up there if you want to have a look.� 

�I�ll do that.� But he didn�t move. No eagerness, of course, was to be evinced on either side. 

�Seen the great ship come in?� he asked. 

 Ogion�s house looked west and north, and from it one could see only the rocky headlands at the mouth of 
the bay, the Armed Cliffs; but from the village itself at several places one could look down the steep 
back-and-forth road to Gont Port and see the docks and the whole harbor. Shipwatching was a regular 
pursuit in Re Albi. There were generallY a couple of old men on the bench behind the smithy, which gave 
the best view, and though they might never in their lives have gone down the fifteen zigzag miles of that 
road to Gont Port, they watched the comings and goings of ships as a spectacle, strange yet familiar, 
provided for their entertainment. 

�From Havnor, smith�s boy said. He was down in Port bargaining for ingots. Come up yesterevening 
late. The great ship�s from Havnor Great Port, he said.� 


He was probably talking to keep her mind off the price of goats, and the slyness of his look was 
probably simply the way his eyes were made. But Havnor Great Port traded little with Gont, a poor and 
remote island notable only for wizards, pirates, and goats; and something in the words, �the great ship,� 
troubled or alarmed her, she did not know why. 

�He said they say there�s a king in Havnor now,� the sheep-buyer went on, with a sidelong glance. 

�That might be a good thing,� said Tenar. 

Townsend nodded. �Might keep the foreign riffraff out.� 

Tenar nodded her foreign head pleasantly. �But there�s those down in Port won�t be pleased, maybe.� He 
meant the pirate sea-captains of Gont, whose control of the northeastern seas had been increasing of late 
years to the point where many of the old trade-schedules with the central islands of the Archipelago had 
been disrupted or abandoned; this impoverished everyone on Gont except the pirates, but that did not 
prevent the pirates from being heroes in the eyes of most Gontishmen. For all she knew, Tenar�s son was a 
sailor on a pirate ship. And safer, maybe, as such than on a steady merchantman. Better shark than herring, 
as they said. 

�There�s some who�re never pleased no matter what,� Tenar said, automatically following the rules of 
conversation, but impatient enough with them that she added, rising, �I�ll show you the goats. You can have 
a look. I don�t know if we�ll sell all or any.� And she took the man to the 

broom-pasture gate and left him. She did not like him. It wasn�t his fault that he had brought her bad news 
once and maybe twice, but his eyes slid, and she did not like his company. She wouldn�t sell him Ogion�s 
goats. Not even Sippy. 

 

 After he had left, bargainless, she found herself uneasy. She had said to him, �I don�t know if we�ll sell,� 
and that had been foolish, to say we instead of 1, when he hadn�t asked to speak to Sparrowhawk, hadn�t 
even alluded to him, as a man bargaining with a woman was more than likely to do, especially when she was 
refusing his offer. 

She did not know what they made of Sparrowhawk, of his presence and nonpresence, in the village. 
Ogion, aloof and silent and in some ways feared, had been their own mage and their fellow-villager. 
Sparrowhawk they might be proud of as a name, the archmage who had lived awhile in Re Albi and done 
wonderful things, fooling a dragon in the Ninety Isles, bringing the Ring of Erreth-Akbe back from 
somewhere or other; but they did not know him. Nor did he know them. He had not gone into the village 
since he came, only to the forest, the wilderness. She had not thought about it before, but he avoided the 
village as surely as Therru did. 

They must have talked about him. It was a village, and people talked. But gossip about the doings of 
wizards and mages would not go far. The matter was too uncanny, the lives of men of power were too 
strange, too different from their own. �Let be,� she had heard villagers in the Middle Valley say when 
somebody got to speculating too freely about a visiting weatherworker or their own wizard, Beech-� �Let be. 
He goes his way, not ours. 

 As for herself, that she should have stayed on to nurse and serve such a man of power would not seem a 
questionable matter to them; again it was a case of �Let be.� She had not been very much in the village 
herself; they were neither friendly nor unfriendly to her. She had lived there once in Weaver Fan�s cottage, 
she was the old mage�s ward, he had sent Townsend down round the mountain for her; all that was very well. 
But then she had come with the child, terrible to look at, who�d walk about in daylight with it by choice? 
And what kind of woman would be a wizard�s pupil, a wizard�s nurse? Witchery there, sure enough, and 


foreign too. But all the same, she was wife to a rich farmer way down there in the Middle Valley; though he 
was dead and she a widow. Well, who could understand the ways of the witchfolk? Let be, better let be.... 

She met the Archmage of Earthsea as he came past the garden fence. She said, �They say there�s a ship in 
from the City of Havnor. � 

He stopped. He made a movement, quickly controlled, but it had been the beginning of a turn to run, to 
break and run like a mouse from a hawk. 

�Ged!� she said. �What is it?� 

�I can�t, � he said. �I can�t face them.� 

�Who?� 

�Men from him. From the king.� 

His face had gone greyish, as when he was first here, and he looked around for a place to hide. 

His terror was so urgent and undefended that she thought only how to spare him. �You needn�t see them. 
If anybody comes I�ll send them away. Come back to the house now. You haven�t eaten all day.� 

�There was a man there,� he said. 

�Townsend, pricing goats. I sent him away. Come on!� He came with her, and when they were in the 
house she shut the door. 

 �They couldn�t harm you, surely, Ged. Why would they want to?� 

 He sat down at the table and shook his head dully. �No, no. 

 �Do they know you�re here?� 

 �I don�t know.� 

 �What is it you�re afraid of?� she asked, not impatiently, but with some rational authority. 

He put his hands across his face, rubbing his temples and forehead, looking down. �I was--� he said. �I�m 
not- It was all he could say. 

She stopped him, saying, �All right, it�s all right.� She dared not touch him lest she worsen his 
humiliation by any semblance of pity. She was angry at him, and for him. �It�s none of their business,� � she 
said, �where you are, or who you are, or what you choose to do or not to do! If they come prying they can 
leave curious.� That was Lark�s saying. She had a pang of longing for the company of an ordinary, sensible 
woman. �Anyhow, the ship may have nothing at all to do with you. They may be chasing pirates home. It ll 
be a good thing, too, when the king gets around to doing that.. . . I found some wine in the back of the 
cupboard, a couple of bottles, I wonder how long Ogion had it squirreled away there. I think we�d both do 
well with a glass of wine. And some bread and cheese. The little one�s had her dinner and gone off with 
Heather to catch frogs. There may be frogs� legs for supper. But bread and cheese for now. And wine. I 
wonder where it�s from, who brought it to Ogion, how old it is?� So she talked along, woman�s babble, 
saving him from having to make any answer or misread any silence, until he had got over the crisis of shame, 
and eaten a little, and drunk a glass of the old, soft, red wine. 

�It�s best I go, Tenar,� he said. �Till I learn to be what I am now. 

�Go where?� � 

�Up on the mountain.� 

�Wandering-like Ogion?� � She looked at him. She remembered walking with him on the roads of Atuan, 
deriding him: �Do wizards often beg?� And he had answered, �Yes, but they try to give something in 
exchange. � � 

She asked cautiously, �Could you get on for a while as a weatherworker, or a finder?� She filled his 
glass full. 


He shook his head. He drank wine, and looked away. �No,� he said. �None of that. Nothing of that.� 

She did not believe him. She wanted to rebel, to deny, to say to him, How can it be, how can you say 
that-as if you�d forgotten all you know, all you learned from Ogion, and at Roke, and in your traveling! You 
can�t have forgotten the words, the names, the acts of your art. You learned, you earned your power!-She 
kept herself from saying that, but she murmured, �I don�t understand. How can it all . . . � � 

�A cup of water,� he said, tipping his glass a little as if to pour it out. And after a while, � �What I don�t 
understand is why he brought me back. The kindness of the young is cruelty.... So I�m here, I have to get on 
with it, till I can go back.� 

She did not know clearly what he meant, but she heard a note of blame or complaint that, in him, shocked 
and angered her. She spoke stiffly: �It was Kalessin that brought you here.� 

It was dark in the house with the door closed and only the small western window letting in the 
late-afternoon light. She could not make out his expression; but presently he raised his glass to her with a 
shadowy smile, and drank. 

�This wine,� he said. �Some great merchant or pirate must have brought it to Ogion. I never drank its 
equal. 

 Even in Havnor.� He turned the squat glass in his hands, looking down at it. �I�ll call myself something,� 
� he said, �and go across the mountain, to Armouth and the East Forest country, where I came from. They�ll 
be making hay. There�s always work at haying and harvest. � 

She did not know how to answer.� Fragile and jll~looking, he would be given such work only out of 
charity or brutality; and if he got it he would not be able to do it.� 

�The roads aren�t like they used to be,� she said.� �These last years, there�s thieves and gangs 
everywhere. Foreign riffraff, as my friend Townsend says. But it�s not safe any more to go alone.� 

Looking at him in the dusky light to see how he took this, she wondered sharply for a moment what it 
must be like never to have feared a human being-what it would be like to have to learn to be afraid . 

�Ogion still went-�� he began, and then set his mouth; he had recalled that Ogion had been a mage. 

�Down in the south part of the island,� � Tenar said, �there�s a lot of herding. Sheep, goats, cattle. They 
drive them up into the hills before the Long Dance, and pasture them there until the rains. They�re always 
needing herders. � She drank a mouthful of the wine. It was like the dragon�s name in her mouth.� �But why 
can�t you just stay here?� - 

�Not in Ogion�s house.� The first place they�ll come. �Well, what if they do come? What will they want 
of you?� 

�To be what I was. 

The desolation of his voice chilled her. 

She was silent, trying to remember what it was like to have been powerful, to be the Eaten One, the One 
Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, and then to lose that, throw it away, become only Tenar, only herself.� She 
thought about how it was to have been a woman in the prime of life, with children and a man, and then to 
lose all that, becoming old and a widow, powerless.� But even so she did not feel she understood his shame, 
his agony of humiliation. Perhaps only a man could feel so. A woman got used to shame. 

Or maybe Aunty Moss was right, and when the meat was out the shell was empty.� 

Witch-thoughts, she thought. And to turn his mind and her own, and because the soft, fiery wine made 
her wits and tongue quick, she said, �Do you know, I�ve thought-about Ogion teaching me, and I wouldn�t 
go on, but went and found myself my farmer and married him-I thought, when I did that, I thought on my 
wedding day, Ged will be angry when he hears of this!� She laughed as she spoke.� 

�I was, � he said.� She waited. He said, �I was disappointed.� �Angry,� she said.� �Angry,� he said. He 


poured her glass full. 

�I had the power to know power, then,� � he said. �And you-you shone, in that terrible place, the Labyrinth, 
that darkness 

�Well, then, tell me: what should I have done with my power, and the knowledge Ogion tried to teach me?� 
� 

�Use it.� 

 

 �How?� 

 �As the Art Magic is used.�� 

 �By whom?� 

 �Wizards,� he said, a little painfully.� 

 �Magic means the skills, the arts of wizards, of mages?�� �What else would it mean?� 

 �Is that all it could ever mean? � � 

 He pondered, glancing up at her once or twice. �When Ogion taught me,� she said, �here-at the hearth 
there-the words of the Old Speech, they were as easy and as hard in my mouth as in his.� That was like 
learning the language I spoke before I was born. But the rest-the lore, the runes of power, the spells, the rules, 
the raising of the forces-that was all dead to me. Somebody else�s language. I used to think, I could be 
dressed up as a warrior, with a lance and a sword and a plume and all, but it wouldn t fit, would it? What 
would I do with the sword? Would it make me a hero? I�d be myself in clothes that didn�t fit, is all, hardly 
able to walk.� 

She sipped her wine. 

�So I took it all off,� she said, �and put on my own clothes.� 

�What did Ogion say when you left him?� � 

�What did Ogion usually say?� 

That roused the shadowy smile again.� He said nothing. 

She nodded. 

After a while, she went on more softly, �He took me because you brought me to him. He wanted no 
prentice after you, and he never would have taken a girl but from you, at your asking. But he loved me. He 
did me honor. And I loved and honored him.� But he couldn�t give me what I wanted, and I couldn�t take 
what he had to give me. He knew that.� But, Ged, it was a different matter when he saw Therru.� The day 
before he died. You say, and Moss says, that power knows power.� I don�t know what he saw in her, but he 
said, �Teach her!� And he said . . . 

Ged waited.� 

 �He said, �They will fear her.�� And he said, �Teach her all! Not Roke.�� I don�t know what he meant.� 
How can I know? If I had stayed here with him I might know, I might be able to teach her. But I thought, 
Ged will come, he�ll know. He�ll know what to teach her, what she needs to know, my wronged one.�� 

�I do not know,� he said, speaking very low. �I saw- In the child I see only-the wrong done. The evil.� 

He drank off his wine.� 

�I have nothing to give her,� he said. 

There was a little scraping knock at the door.� He started up instantly with that same helpless turn of the 
body, looking for a place to hide. 

Tenar went to the door, opened it a crack, and smelled Moss before she saw her.� 

�Men in the village,� � the old woman whispered dramatically. �All kind of fine folk come up from the 


Port, from the great ship that�s in from Havnor City, they say.� Come after the Archmage, they say. 

�He doesn�t want to see them,� � Tenar said weakly. She had no idea what to do. 

�I dare say not,� said the witch.� And after an expectant pause, �Where is he, then?� 

�Here,� said Sparrowhawk, coming to the door and opening it wider. Moss eyed him and said nothing.� 

�Do they know where I am?� 

�Not from me,� Moss said.� 

�If they come here,� said Tenar, �all you have to do is send them away-after all, you are the Archmage-� 
� 

Neither he nor Moss was paying attention to her. 

 �They won�t come to my house,� Moss said.� �Come on, if you like.� 

 He followed her, with a glance but no word to Tenar. 

 �But what am I to tell them?� she demanded. 

 �Nothing, dearie,� said the witch. 

 Heather and Therru came back from the marshes with seven dead frogs in a net bag, and Tenar busied 
herself cutting off and skinning the legs for the hunters� supper. She was just finishing when she heard 
voices outside, and looking up at the open door saw people standing at it-men in hats, a twist of gold, a 
glitter- �Mistress Goha?� � said a civil voice.� 

�Come in!� she said.� 

They came in: five men, seeming twice as many in the low-ceilinged room, and tall, and grand. They 
looked about them, and she saw what they saw. 

They saw a woman standing at a table, holding a long, sharp knife. On the table was a chopping board 
and on that, to one side, a little heap of naked greenish-white legs; to the other, a heap of fat, bloody, dead 
frogs. In the shadow behind the door something lurked-a child, but a child deformed, mismade, half-faced, 
claw-handed.� On a bed in an alcove beneath the single window sat a big, bony young woman, staring at 
them with her mouth wide open. Her hands were bloody and muddy and her dank skirt smelled of 
marsh-water. When she saw them look at her, she tried to hide her face with her skirt, baring her legs to the 
thigh. 

They looked away from her, and from the child, and there was no one else to look at but the woman with 
the dead frogs. 

�Mistress Goha,� one of them repeated.� 

�So I�m called,� she said. 

 �We come from Havnor, from the King,� said the civil voice.� She could not see his face clearly against 
the light. �We seek the Archmage, Sparrowhawk of Gont.� King Lebannen is to be crowned at the turn of 
autumn, and he seeks to have the Archmage, his lord and friend, with him to make ready for the coronation, 
and to crown him, if he will.�� 

The man spoke steadily and formally, as to a lady in a palace.� He wore sober breeches of leather and a 
linen shirt dusty from the climb up from Gont Port, but it was fine cloth, with embroidery of gold thread at 
the throat.� 

�He�s not here,� Tenar said.� 

A couple of little boys from the village peered in at the door and drew back, peered again, fled shouting. 

�Maybe you can tell us where he is, Mistress Goha,� said the man. 

�I cannot.� 

She looked at them all. The fear of them she had felt at first-caught from Sparrowhawk�s panic, perhaps, 


or mere foolish fluster at seeing strangers-was subsiding. Here she stood in Ogion�s house; and she knew 
well enough why Ogion had never been afraid of great people.� 

�You must be tired after that long road,� � she said. �Will you sit down? There�s wine.� Here, I must 
wash the glasses.� 

She carried the chopping board over to the sideboard, put the frogs� legs in the larder, scraped the rest 
into the swill-pail that Heather would carry to Weaver Fan�s pigs, washed her hands and arms and the knife 
at the basin, poured fresh water, and rinsed out the two glasses she and Sparrowhawk had drunk from.� 
There was one other glass in the cabinet, and two clay cups without handles. She set these on the table, and 
poured wine for the visitors; there was just enough left in the bottle to go round. They had exchanged 
glances, and had not sat down.� The shortage of chairs excused that. The rules of hospitality, however, 
bound them to accept what she offered. Each man took glass or cup from her with a polite murmur.� 
Saluting her, they drank. 

 �My word!� said one of them. 

 �Andrades-the Late Harvest, said another, with round eyes.� 

 A third shook his head.� �Andrades-the Dragon Year,� he said solemnly.� 

 The fourth nodded and sipped again, reverent.� The fifth, who was the first to have spoken, lifted his clay 
cup to Tenar again and said, �You honor us with a king�s wine, mistress.�� 

�It was Ogion�s,� she said. �This was Ogion�s house. This is Aihal�s house.� You knew that, my lords?� 

�We did, mistress. The king sent us to this house, believing that the archmage would come here; and, 
when word of the death of its master came to Roke and I-Iavnor, yet more certain of it.� But it was a dragon 
that bore the archmage from Roke. And no word or sending has come from him since then to Roke or to the 
king. And it is much in the king�s heart, and much in the interest of us all, to know the archmage is here, and 
is well. Did he come here, mistress?� 

�I cannot say,� she said, but it was a poor equivocation, repeated, and she could see that the men thought 
so. She drew herself up, standing behind the table.� �I mean that I will not say. I think if the archmage 
wishes to come, he will come.� If he wishes not to be found, you will not find him. Surely you will not seek 
him out against his will.� 

The oldest of the men, and the tallest, said, �The king�s will is ours.� 

The first speaker said more conciliatingly, �We are only messengers. What is between the king and the 
archmage of the Isles is between them. We seek only to bring the message, and the reply.� 

�If I can, I will see that your message reaches him.� 

�And the reply?� � the oldest man demanded.� 

She said nothing, and the first speaker said, �We�ll be here some few days at the house of the Lord of Re 
Albi, who, hearing of our ship�s arrival, offered us his hospitality. � � 

She felt a sense of a trap laid or a noose tightening, though she did not know why. Sparrowhawk�s 
vulnerability, his sense of his own weakness, had infected her.� Distraught, she used the defense of her 
appearance, her seeming to be a mere goodwife, a middle-aged housekeeper-but was it seeming? It was also 
truth, and these matters were more subtle even than the guises and shape-changes of wizards.- She ducked 
her head and said, �That will be more befitting your lordships� comfort. You see we live very plain here, as 
the old mage did.�� 

�And drink Andrades wine,� said the one who had identified the vintage, a bright-eyed, handsome man 
with a winning smile. She, playing her part, kept her head down. But as they took their leave and filed out, 
she knew that, seem what she might and be what she might, if they did not know now that she was Tenar of 


the Ring they would know it soon enough; and so would know that she herself knew the archmage and was 
indeed their way to him, if they were determined to seek him out.� 

When they were gone, she heaved a great sigh.� Heather did so too, and then finally shut her mouth, 
which had hung open all the time they were there. 

�I never,� she said, in a tone of deep, replete satisfaction, and went to see where the goats had got to.� 

Therru came out from the dark place behind the door, where she had barricaded herself from the 
strangers with Ogion�s staff and Tenar�s alder stick and her own hazel switch. She moved in the tight, 
sidling way she had mostly abandoned since they had been here, not looking up, the 

ruined half of her face bent down towards the shoulder. 

 Tenar went to her and knelt to hold her in her arms. �Therru,� � she said, �they won�t hurt you. They 
mean no harm.� 

 The child would not look at her. She let Tenar hold her like a block of wood.� 

 �If you say so, I won�t let them in the house again.� 

 After a while the child moved a little and asked in her hoarse, thick voice, �What will they do to 
Sparrowhawk?� � 

�Nothing,� Tenar said. �No harm! They come-they mean to do him honor.� 

But she had begun to see what their attempt to do him honor would do to him-denying his loss, denying 
him his grief for what he had lost, forcing him to act the part of what he was no longer. 

When she let the child go, Therru went to the closet and fetched out Ogion�s broom.� She laboriously 
swept the floor where the men from Havnor had stood, sweeping away their footprints, sweeping the dust of 
their feet out the door, off the doorstep. 

Watching her, Tenar made up her mind. 

She went to the shelf where Ogion�s three great books stood, and rummaged there. She found several 
goose quills and a half-dried-up bottle of ink, but not a scrap of paper or parchment.� She set her jaw, hating 
to do damage to anything so sacred as a book, and scored and tore out a thin strip of paper from the blank 
endsheet of the Book of Runes. She sat at the table and dipped the pen and wrote.� Neither the ink nor the 
words came easy.� She had scarcely written anything since she had sat at this same table a quarter of a 
century ago, with Ogion looking over her shoulder, teaching her the runes of Hardic and the Great Runes of 
Power.� She wrote: 

 

go oak farm in midi valy to clerbrook 

say goha sent to look to garden & sheep 

 

 It took her nearly as long to read it over as it had to write it. By now Therru had finished her sweeping and 
was watching her, intent. 

She added one word: 

 

to-night 

 

 

 �Where�s Heather?� � she asked the child, as she folded the paper on itself once and twice. �I want her to 
take this to Aunty Moss�s house.� 

She longed to go herself, to see Sparrowhawk, but dared not be seen going, lest they were watching her 
to lead them to him. 


�I�ll go,� Therru whispered.� Tenar looked at her sharply. 

�You�ll have to go alone, Therru. Past the village.� 

The child nodded.� 

�Give it only to him!� 

She nodded again. 

Tenar tucked the paper into the child�s pocket, held her, kissed her, let her go.� Therru went, not 
crouching and sidling now but running freely, flying, Tenar thought, seeing her vanish in the evening light 
beyond the dark door-frame, flying like a bird, a dragon, a child, free.� 

 

 

 

 

 

Hawks 

Therru was back soon with Sparrowhawk�s reply: �He said he�ll leave tonight.� 

 Tenar heard this with satisfaction, relieved that he had accepted her plan, that he would get clear away 
from these messengers and messages he dreaded. It was not till she had fed Heather and Therm their frog-leg 
feast, and put Therru to bed and sung to her, and was sitting up alone without lamp or firelight, that her heart 
began to sink. He was gone. He was not strong, he was bewildered and uncertain, he needed friends; and she 
had sent him away from those who were and those who wished to be his friends. He was gone, and she must 
stay, to keep the hounds from his trail, to learn at least whether they stayed in Gont or sailed back to 
Havnor.� 

His panic and her obedience to it began to seem so unreasonable to her that she thought it equally 
unreasonable, improbable, that he would in fact go.� He would use his wits and simply hide in Moss�s house, 
which was the last place in all Earthsea that a king would look for an archmage.� It would be much better if 
he stayed there till the king�s men left.� Then he could come back here to Ogion�s house, where he belonged, 
And it would go on as before, she looking after him until he had his strength back, and he giving her his dear 
companionship. 

A shadow against the stars in the doorway: �Hsssst! Awake?� Aunty Moss came in. �Well, he�s off,� she 
said, conspiratorial, jubilant. �Went the old forest road. Says he�ll cut down to the Middle Valley way, along 
past Oak Springs, tomorrow.� 

�Good,� said Tenar. 

Bolder than usual, Moss sat down uninvited. �I gave him a loaf and a bit of cheese for the way.� 

�Thank you, Moss. That was kind.� 

�Mistress Goha.� Moss�s voice in the darkness took on the singsong resonance of her chanting and 
spellcasting. �There�s a thing I was wanting to say to you, dearie, without going beyond what I can know, 
for I know you�ve lived among great folks and been one of �em yourself, and that seals my mouth when I 
think of it. And yet there�s things I know that you�ve had no way of knowing, for all the learning of the runes, 
and the Old Speech, and all you�ve learned from the wise, and in the foreign lands.� 

�That�s so, Moss.� 


�Aye, well, then. So when we talked about how witch knows witch, and power knows power, and I 
said-of him who�s gone now-that he was no mage now, whatever he had been, and still you would deny 
it-But I was right, wasn�t I?� 

�Yes.� 

�Aye. I was. 

�He said so himself.� 

�0� course he did. He don�t lie nor say this is that and that�s this till you don�t know which end�s up, I�ll 
say that for him. He�s not one tries to drive the cart without the ox, either. But I�ll say flat out I�m glad he�s 
gone, for it wouldn�t do, it wouldn�t do any longer, being a different matter with him now, and all.� 

Tenar had no idea what she was talking about, except for her image of trying to drive the cart without the 
ox. �I don�t know why he�s so afraid,� she said. �Well, I know in part, but I don�t understand it, why he feels 
such shame. But I know he thinks that he should have died. And I know that all I understand about living is 
having your work to do, and being able to do it. That�s the pleasure, and the glory, and all. And if you can�t 
do the work, or it�s taken from you, then what�s any good? You have to have something 

Moss listened and nodded as at words of wisdom, but after a slight pause she said, �It�s a queer thing for 
an old man to be a boy of fifteen, no doubt!� 

Tenar almost said, �What are you talking about, Moss?� �-but something prevented her. She realized that 
she had been listening for Ged to come into the house from his roaming on the mountainside, that she was 
listening for the sound of his voice, that her body denied his absence. She glanced suddenly over at the witch, 
a shapeless lump of black perched on Ogion�s chair by the empty hearth. 

�Ah!� she said, a great many thoughts suddenly coming into her mind all at once. 

�That�s why,� she said. �That�s why I never-� 

After a quite long silence, she said, �Do they-do wizards-is it a spell?� 

�Surely, surely, dearie,� said Moss. �They witch �em-selves. Some�ll tell you they make a trade-off, like 
a mar-riage turned backward, with vows and all, and so get their power then. But to me that�s got a wrong 
sound to it, like a dealing with the Old Powers more than what a true witch deals with. And the old mage, he 
told me they did no such thing. Though I�ve known some woman witches do it, and come to no great harm by 
it. 

�The ones who brought me up did that, promising virginity.� 

�Oh, aye, no men, you told me, and them yurnix. Terrible!� 

�But why, but why-why did I never think-� 

The witch laughed aloud. �Because that�s the power of �em, dearie. You don�t think! You can�t! And nor 
do they, once they�ve set their spell. How could they? Given their power? It wouldn�t do, would it, it 
wouldn�t do. You don�t get without you give as much. That�s true for all, surely. So they know that, the 
witch men, the men of power, they know that better than any. But then, you know, it�s an uneasy thing for a 
man not to be a man, no matter if he can call the sun down from the sky. And so they put it right out of mind, 
with their spells of binding. And truly so. Even in these bad times we�ve been having, with the spells going 
wrong and all, I haven�t yet heard of a wizard breaking those spells, seeking to use his power for his body�s 
lust. Even the worst would fear to. 0� course, there�s those will work illusions, but they only fool �emselves. 
And there�s witch men of little account, witch-tinkers and the like, some of them�ll try their own spells of 
beguilement on country women, but for all I can see, those spells don�t amount to much. What it is, is the one 
power�s as great as the other, and each goes its own way. That�s how I see it.� 

Tenar sat thinking, absorbed. At last she said, �They set themselves apart.� 


�Aye. A wizard has to do that.� 

�But you don�t.� 

�Me? I�m only an old witchwoman, dearie.� 

�How old?� 

After a minute Moss�s voice in the darkness said, with a hint of laughter in it, �Old enough to keep out of 
trouble.� 

�But you said . . . You haven�t been celibate.� 

�What�s that, dearie?� 

 �Like the wizards.� 

�Oh, no. No, no! Never was anything to look at, but there was a way I could look at them.. . not witching, you 
know, dearie, you know what I mean. . . there�s a way to look, and he�d come round, sure as a crow will caw, 
in a day or two or three he�d come around my place-� I need a cure for my dog�s mange,� �I need a tea for my 
sick granny,' -but I knew what it was they needed, and if I liked �em well enough maybe they got it. And for 
love, for love-I�m not one o� them, you know, though maybe some witches are, but they dishonor the art, I 
say. I do my art for pay but I take my pleasure for love, that�s what I say. Not that it�s all pleasure, all that. I 
was crazy for a man here for a long time, years, a good-looking man he was, but a hard, cold heart. He�s long 
dead. Father to that Townsend who�s come back here to live, you know him. Oh, I was so heartset on that 
man I did use my art, I spent many a charm on him, but �twas all wasted. All for nothing. No blood in a 
turnip. . . . And I came up here to Re Albi in the first place when I was a girl because I was in trouble with a 
man in Gont Port. But I can�t talk of that, for they were rich, great folks. �Twas they had the power, not I! 
They didn�t want their son tangled with a common girl like me, foul slut they called me, and they�d have had 
me put out of the way, like killing a cat, if I hadn�t run off up here. But oh, I did like that lad, with his round, 
smooth arms and legs and his big, dark eyes, I can see him plain as plain after all these years. . . . 

They sat a long while silent in the darkness. 

�When you had a man, Moss, did you have to give up your power?� 

�Not a bit of it,� the witch said, complacent. 

�But you said you don�t get unless you give. Is it different, then, for men and for women?� 

�What isn�t, dearie?� 

�I don�t know,� Tenar said. �It seems to me we make up most of the differences, and then complain 
about �em. I don�t see why the Art Magic, why power, should be different for a man witch and a woman 
witch. Unless the power itself is different. Or the art.� 

�A man gives out, dearie. A woman takes in.� 

Tenar sat silent but unsatisfied. 

�Ours is only a little power, seems like, next to theirs,� Moss said. �But it goes down deep. It�s all roots. 
It�s like an old blackberry thicket. And a wizard�s power�s like a fir tree, maybe, great and tall and grand, but 
it�ll blow right down in a storm. Nothing kills a blackberry bramble.� She gave her hen-chuckle, pleased 
with her comparison. �Well, then!� she said briskly. �So as I said, it�s maybe just as well he�s on his way and 
out o� the way, lest people in the town begin to talk.� �To talk?� 

�You�re a respectable woman, dearie, and her reputation is a woman�s wealth.� 

�Her wealth,� Tenar repeated in the same blank way; then she said it again: �Her wealth. Her treasure. 
Her hoard. Her value She stood up, unable to sit still, stretching her back and arms. �Like the dragons who 
found caves, who built fortresses for their treasure, for their hoard, to be safe, to sleep on their treasure, to be 
their treasure. Take in, take in, and never give out!� 


�You�ll know the value of a good reputation,� Moss said drily, �when you�ve lost it. �Tisn�t everything. 
But it�s hard to fill the place of.� 

�Would you give up being a witch to be respectable, Moss?� 

�I don�t know,� Moss said after a while, thoughtfully. �I 

don�t know as I�d know how. I have the one gift, maybe, but not the other.� 

Tenar went to her and took her hands. Surprised at the gesture, Moss got up, drawing away a little; but 
Tenar drew her forward and kissed her cheek. 

The older woman put up one hand and timidly touched Tenar�s hair, one caress, as Ogion had used to do. 
Then she pulled away and muttered about having to go home, and started to leave, and asked at the door, �Or 
would you rather I stayed, with them foreigners about?� 

�Go on,� Tenar said. �I�m used to foreigners.� 

 

That night as she lay going to sleep she entered again into the vast gulfs of wind and light, but the light was 
smoky, red and orange-red and amber, as if the air itself were fire. In this element she was and was not; 
flying on the wind and being the wind, the blowing of the wind, the force that went free; and no voice called 
to her. 

 

In the morning she sat on the doorstep brushing out her hair. She was not fair to blondness, like many 
Kargish people; her skin was pale, but her hair dark. It was still dark, hardly a thread of grey in it. She had 
washed it, using some of the water that was heating to wash clothes in, for she had decided the laundry would 
be her day�s work, Ged being gone, and her respectability secure. She dried her hair in the sun, brushing it, In 
the hot, windy morning, sparks followed the brush and crackled from the flying ends of her hair. 

Therru came to stand behind her, watching. Tenar turned and saw her so intent she was almost trembling. 

�What is it, birdlet?� 

�The fire flying out,� the child said, with fear or exultation. �All over the sky!� 

�It�s just the sparks from my hair,� Tenar said, a little taken aback. Therru was smiling, and she did not 
know if she had ever seen the child smile before. Therru reached out both her hands, the whole one and the 
burned, as if to touch and follow the flight of something around Tenar�s loose, floating hair. �The fires, all 
flying out,� she repeated, and she laughed. 

At that moment Tenar first asked herself how Therru saw her-saw the world-and knew she did not know: 
that she could not know what one saw with an eye that had been burned away. And Ogion�s words, They wi/I 
fear her, returned to her; but she felt no fear of the child. Instead, she brushed her hair again, vigorously, so 
the sparks would fly, and once again she heard the little husky laugh of delight. 

She washed the sheets, the dishcloths, her shifts and spare dress, and Therm�s dresses, and laid them out 
(after making sure the goats were in the fenced pasture) in the meadow to dry on the dry grass, weighting 
down the things with stones, for the wind was gusty, with a late-summer wildness in it. 

Therm had been growing. She was still very small and thin for her age, which must be about eight, but in 
the last couple of months, with her injuries healed at last and free of pain, she had begun to run about more 
and to eat more. She was fast outgrowing her clothes, hand-me-downs from Lark�s youngest, a girl of five. 

Tenar thought she might walk into the village and visit with Weaver Fan and see if he might have an end 
or two of cloth to give in exchange for the swill she had been sending for his pigs. She would like to sew 
something for Therru. And she would like to visit with old Fan, too. Ogion�s death and Ged�s illness had 
kept her from the village and the people she had known there. They had pulled her away, as ever, from what 


she knew, what she knew how to do, the world she had chosen to live in-a world not of kings and queens, 
great powers and dominions, high arts and journeys and adventures (she thought as she made sure Therru 
was with Heather, and set off into town), but of common people doing common things, such as marrying, 
and bringing up children, and farming, and sewing, and doing the wash. She thought this with a kind of 
vengefulness, as if she were thinking it at Ged, now no doubt halfway to Middle Valley. She imagined him 
on the road, near the dell where she and Therru had slept. She imagined the slight, ashen-haired man going 
along alone and silently, with half a loaf of the witch�s bread in his pocket, and a load of misery in his heart. 

�It�s time you found out, maybe,� she thought to him. �Time you learned that you didn�t learn everything 
on Roke!� As she harangued him thus in her mind, another image came into it: she saw near Ged one of the 
men who had stood waiting for her and Therru on that road. Involuntarily she said, �Ged, be 
careful!�-fearing for him, for he did not carry even a stick. It was not the big fellow with hairy lips that she 
saw, but another of them, a youngish man with a leather cap, the one who had stared hard at Therru. 

She looked up to see the little cottage next to Fan�s house, where she had lived when she lived here. 
Between it and her a man was passing. It was the man she had been remembering, imagining, the man with a 
leather cap. He was going past the cottage, past the weaver�s house; he had not seen her. She watched him 
walk on up the village street without stopping. He was going either to the turning of the hill road or to the 
mansion house. 

Without pausing to think why, Tenar followed him at a distance until she saw which turn he took. He 
went on up the hill to the domain of the Lord of Re Albi, not down the road that Ged had gone. 

She turned back then, and made her visit to old Fan. 

Though almost a recluse, like many weavers, Fan had been kind in his shy way to the Kargish girl, and 
vigilant. How many people, she thought, had protected her respectability! Now nearly blind, Fan had an 
apprentice who did most of the weaving. He was glad to have a visitor. He sat as if in state in an old carved 
chair under the object from which his use-name came: a very large painted fan, the treasure of his family-the 
gift, so the story went, of a generous sea-pirate to his grandfather for some speedy sail-making in time of 
need. It was displayed open on the wall. The delicately painted men and women in their gorgeous robes of 
rose and jade and azure, the towers and bridges and banners of Havnor Great Port, were all familiar to Tenar 
as soon as she saw the fan again. Visitors to Re Albi were often brought to see it. It was the finest thing, all 
agreed, in the village. 

She admired it, knowing it would please the old man, and because it was indeed very beautiful, and he 
said, �You�ve not seen much to equal that, in all your travels, eh?� 

�No, no. Nothing like it in Middle Valley at all,� said she. 

�When you was here, in my cottage, did I ever show you the other side of it?� 

�The other side? No,� she said, and nothing would do then but he must get the fan down; only she had to 
climb up and do it, carefully untacking it, since he could not see well enough and could not climb up on the 
chair. He directed her anxiously. She laid it in his hands, and he peered with his dim eyes at it, half closed it to 
make sure the ribs played freely, then closed it all the way, turned it over, and handed it to her. 

 �Open it slow,� he said. 

She did so. Dragons moved as the folds of the fan moved. Painted faint and fine on the yellowed silk, 
dragons of pale red, blue, green moved and grouped, as the figures on the other side were grouped, among 
clouds and mountain peaks. 

�Hold it up to the light,� said old Fan. 

She did so, and saw the two sides, the two paintings, made one by the light flowing through the silk, so 


that the clouds and peaks were the towers of the city, and the men and women were winged, and the dragons 
looked with human eyes. 

�You see?� 

 �I see,� she murmured. 

�I can�t, now, but it�s in my mind�s eye. I don�t show many that.�� 

�It is very wonderful.� 

�I meant to show it to the old mage,� Fan said, �but with one thing and another I never did.� 

Tenar turned the fan once more before the light, then remounted it as it had been, the dragons hidden in 
darkness, the men and women walking in the light of day. 

Fan took her out next to see his pigs, a fine pair, fattening nicely towards autumn sausages. They 
discussed Heather�s shortcomings as a swill-carrier. Tenar told him that she fancied a scrap of cloth for a 
child�s dress, and he was delighted, pulling out a full width of fine linen sheeting for her, while the young 
woman who was his apprentice, and who seemed to have taken up his unsociability as well as his craft, 
clacked away at the broad loom, steady and scowling. 

Walking home, Tenar thought of Therru sitting at that loom. It would be a decent living. The bulk of the 
work was dull, always the same over, but weaving was an honorable trade and in some hands a noble art. 
And people expected weavers to be a bit shy, often to be unmarried, shut away at their work as they were; 
yet they were respected. And working indoors at a loom, Therru would not have to show her face. But the 
claw hand? Could that hand throw the shuttle, warp the loom? 

And was she to hide all her life? 

But what was she to do? �Knowing what her life must be...� 

Tenar set herself to think of something else. Of the dress she would make. Lark�s daughter�s dresses 
were coarse homespun, plain as mud. She could dye half this width, yellow maybe, or with red madder from 
the marsh; and then a full apron or overdress of white, with a ruffle to it. Was the child to be hidden at a loom 
in the dark and never have a ruffle to her skirt? And that would still leave enough for a shift, and a second 
apron if she cut out carefully. 

�Therru!� she called as she approached the house. Heather and Therru had been in the broom-pasture 
when she left. She called again, wanting to show Therru the material and tell her about the dress. Heather 
came gawking around from the springhouse, hauling Sippy on a rope. 

�Where�s Therru?� 

�With you,� Heather replied so serenely that Tenar looked around for the child before she understood 
that Heather had no idea where she was and had simply stated what she wished to be true. 

�Where did you leave her?� 

Heather had no idea. She had never let Tenar down before; she had seemed to understand that Therm had 
to be kept more or less in sight, like a goat. But maybe it was Therru all along who had understood that, and 
had kept herself in sight? So Tenar thought, as having no comprehensible guidance from Heather, she began 
to look and call for the child, receiving no response. 

She kept away from the cliff�s edge as long as she could. Their first day there, she had explained to Therru 
that she must never go alone down the steep fields below the house or along the sheer edge north of it, 
because one-eyed vision cannot judge distance or depth with certainty. The child had obeyed. She always 
obeyed. But children forget. But she would not forget. But she might get close to the edge without knowing 
it. But surely she had gone to Moss�s house. That was it-having been there alone, last night, she would go 
again. That was it, of course. 


She was not there. Moss had not seen her. 

�I�ll find her, I�ll find her, dearie,� she assured Tenar; but instead of going up the forest path to look for 
her as Tenar had hoped she would, Moss began to knot up her hair in preparation for casting a spell of 
finding. 

Tenar ran back to Ogion�s house, calling again and again. And this time she looked down the steep fields 
below the house, hoping to see the little figure crouched playing among the boulders. But all she saw was the 
sea, wrinkled and dark, at the end of those falling fields, and she grew dizzy and sick-hearted . 

She went to Ogion�s grave and a short way past it up the forest path, calling. As she came back through the 
meadow, the kestrel was hunting in the same spot where Ged had watched it hunt. This time it stooped, and 
struck, and rose with some little creature in its talons. It flew fast to the forest. She�s feeding her young, 
Tenar thought. All kinds of thoughts went through her mind very vivid and precise, as she passed the 
laundry laid out on the grass, dry now, she must take it up before evening. She must search around the house, 
the springhouse, the milking shed, more carefully. This was her fault. She had caused it to happen by 
thinking of making Therru into a weaver, shutting her away in the dark to work, to be respectable. When 
Ogion had said 

 

�Teach her, teach her all, Tenar!� When she knew that a wrong that cannot be repaired must be 
transcended. When she knew that the child had been given her and she had failed in her charge, failed her 
trust, lost her, lost the one great gift. 

She went into the house, having searched every corner of the other buildings, and looked again in the 
alcove and round the other bed. She poured herself water, for her mouth was dry as sand. 

Behind the door the three sticks of wood, Ogion�s staff and the walking sticks, moved in the shadows, 
and one of them said, �Here.� 

The child was crouched in that dark corner, drawn into her own body so that she seemed no bigger than a 
little dog, head bent down to the shoulder, arms and legs pulled tight in, the one eye shut. 

�Little bird, little sparrow, little flame, what is wrong? What happened? What have they done to you 
now?� 

Tenar held the small body, closed and stiff as stone, rocking it in her arms. �How could you frighten me 
so? How could you hide from me? Oh, I was so angry!� 

She wept, and her tears fell on the child�s face. 

�Oh Therru, Therru, Therru, don�t hide away from me!� A shudder went through the knotted limbs, and 
slowly they loosened. Therru moved, and all at once clung to Tenar, pushing her face into the hollow 
between Tenar�s breast and shoulder, clinging tighter, till she was clutching desperately. She did not weep. 
She never wept; her tears had been burned out of her, maybe; she had none. But she made a long, moaning, 
sobbing sound. 

Tenar held her, rocking her, rocking her. Very, very slowly the desperate grip relaxed . The head lay 
pillowed on Tenar�s breast. 

�Tell me,� the woman murmured, and the child answered in her faint, hoarse whisper, �He came here.� 

Tenar�s first thought was of Ged, and her mind, still moving with the quickness of fear, caught that, saw 
who �he� was to her, and gave it a wry grin in passing, but passed on, hunting. �Who came here?� 

No answer but a kind of internal shuddering. 

�A man,� Tenar said quietly, �a man in a leather cap.� 

Therru nodded once. 


�We saw him on the road, coming here.� 

No response. 

�The four men-the ones I was angry at, do you remember? He was one of them.� 

But she recalled how Therru had held her head down, hiding the burned side, not looking up, as she had 
always done among strangers. 

�Do you know him, Therru?� 

�Yes.� 

�From-from when you lived in the camp by the river?� 

One nod. 

Tenar�s arms tightened around her. 

�He came here?� she said, and all the fear she had felt turned as she spoke into anger, a rage that burned in 
her the length of her body like a rod of fire. She gave a kind of laugh- �Hah!�-and remembered in that 
moment Kalessin, how Kalessin had laughed. 

But it was not so simple for a human and a woman. The fire must be contained, And the child must be 
comforted. 

�Did he see you?� 

�I hid.� 

Presently Tenar said, stroking Therru�s hair, �He will never touch you, Therru. Understand me and 
believe me: he will never touch you again. He�ll never see you again unless I�m with you, and then he must 
deal with me. Do you understand, my dear, my precious, my beautiful? You need not fear him. You must not 
fear him. He wants you to fear him. He feeds on your fear. We will starve him, Therru. We�ll starve him till 
he eats himself. Till he chokes gnawing on the bones of his own hands. . . . Ah, ah, ah, don�t listen to me now, 
I�m only angry, only angry. . . . Am I red? Am I red like a Gontishwoman, now? Like a dragon, am I red?� She 
tried to joke; and Therru, lifting her head, looked up into her face from her own crumpled, tremulous, 
fire-eaten face and said, �Yes. You are a red dragon.� 

 

 The idea of the man�s coming to the house, being in the house, coming around to look at his handiwork, 
maybe thinking of improving on it, that idea whenever it recurred to Tenar came less as a thought than as a 
queasy fit, a need to vomit, But the nausea burned itself out against the anger. 

They got up and washed, and Tenar decided that what she felt most of all just now was hunger. �I am 
hollow,� she said to Therru, and set them out a substantial meal of bread and cheese, cold beans in oil and 
herbs, a sliced onion, and dry sausage. Therru ate a good deal, and Tenar ate a great deal. 

As they cleared up, she said, �For the present, Therru, I won�t leave you at all, and you won�t leave me. 
Right? And we should both go now to Aunty Moss�s house. She was making a spell to find you, and she 
needn�t bother to go on with it, but she might not know that.� 

Therm stopped moving. She glanced once at the open doorway, and shrank away from it. 

�We need to bring in the laundry, too. On our way back. And when we�re back, I�ll show you the cloth I 
got today. For a dress. For a new dress, for you. A red dress.� 

The child stood, drawing in to herself. 

�If we hide, Therru, we feed him. We will eat. And we will starve him. Come with me. 

The difficulty, the barrier of that doorway to the outside was tremendous to Therru. She shrank from it, 
she hid her face, she trembled, stumbled, it was cruel to force her to cross it, cruel to drive her out of hiding, 
but Tenar was without pity. �Come!� she said, and the child came. 


They walked hand~in~hand acrosS the fields to Moss�s house. Once or twice Therru managed to look up. 

Moss was not surprised to see them, but she had a queer, wary look about her. She told Therru to run 
inside her house to see the ringneck hen�s new chicks and choose which two might be hers; and Therru 
disappeared at once into that refuge. 

�She was in the house all along,� Tenar said. �Hiding.� �Well she might,� said Moss. 

�Why?� Tenar asked harshly. She was not in the hid~ 

ing vein. � 

�There�s-there�s beings about, the witch said, not por~ tentously but uneasily. 

�There�s scoundrels about!� said Tenar, and Moss looked at her and drew back a little. 

�Eh, now, she said. �Eh, dearie. You have a fire around you, a shining of fire all about your head. I cast 
the spell to find the child, but it didn�t go right. It went its own way somehow, and I don�t know yet if it�s 
ended. I�m bewildered. I saw great beings. I sought the little girl but I saw them, flying in the mountains, 
flying in the clouds, And now you have that about you, like your hair was afire. What�s amiss, what�s 
wrong?� 

�A man in a leather cap,� Tenar said. �A youngish man. Well enough looking. The shoulder seam of his 
vest�s torn. Have you seen him round?� 

 

Moss nodded. �They took him on for the haying at the mansion house.� 

�I told you that she�-Tenar glanced at the house-�was with a woman and two men? He�s one of them.� 

�You mean, one of them that-� 

�Yes.� 

Moss stood like a wood carving of an old woman, rigid, a block. �I don�t know,� she said at last. �I 
thought I knew enough. But I don�t. What- What would- Would he come to-to see her?� 

�If he�s the father, maybe he�s come to claim her.� 

�Claim her?� 

�She�s his property.� 

Tenar spoke evenly. She looked up at the heights of Gont Mountain as she spoke. 

�But I think it�s not the father. I think this is the other one. The one that came and told my friend in the 
village that the child had �hurt herself.� � 

Moss was still bewildered, still frightened by her own conjurations and visions, by Tenar�s fierceness, by 
the presence of abominable evil. She shook her head, desolate. �I don�t know,� she said. �I thought I knew 
enough. How could he come back?� 

�To eat,� Tenar said. �To eat. I won�t be leaving her alone again. But tomorrow, Moss, I might ask you 
to keep her here an hour or so, early in the day. Would you do that, while I go up to the manor house?� 

�Aye, dearie. Of course. I could put a hiding spell on her, if you like. But . . . But they�re up there, the great 
men from the King�s City.. . . 

�Why, then, they can see how life is among the common folk,� said Tenar, and Moss drew back again as 
if from a rush of sparks blown her way from a fire in the wind. 

 

 

 

 

 


Finding Words 

They were making hay in the lord�s long meadow, strung out across the slope in the bright shadows of 
morning. Three of the mowers were women, and of the two men one was a boy, as Tenar could make out 
from some distance, and the other was stooped and grizzled. She came up along the mown rows and asked 
one of the women about the man with the leather cap. 

�Him from down by Valmouth, ah,� said the mower. �Don�t know where he�s got to.� The others came 
along the row, glad of a break. None of them knew where the man from Middle Valley was or why he wasn�t 
mowing with them. �That kind don�t stay,� the grizzled man said. �Shiftless. You know him, miss�s?� 

�Not by choice,� said Tenar. �He came lurking about my place-frightened the child. I don�t know what 
he�s called, even. 

 �Calls himself Handy,� the boy volunteered. The others looked at her or looked away and said 
nothing. They were beginning to piece out who she must be, the Kargish woman in the old mage�s house. 
They were tenants of the Lord of Re Albi, suspicious of the villagers, leery of anything to do with Ogion. 
They whetted their scythes, turned away, strung out again, fell to work. Tenar walked down from the hillside 
field, past a row of walnut trees, to the road. 

On it a man stood waiting. Her heart leapt. She strode on to meet him. 

It was Aspen, the wizard of the mansion house. He stood gracefully leaning on his tall pine staff in the 
shade of a roadside tree. As she came out onto the road he said, �Are you looking for work?� 

�No.� 

�My lord needs field hands. This hot weather�s on the turn, the hay must be got in.� 

To Goha, Flint�s widow, what he said was appropriate, and Goha answered him politely, �No doubt your 
skill can turn the rain from the fields till the hay�s in.� But he knew she was the woman to whom Ogion 
dying had spoken his true name, and, given that knowledge, what he said was so insulting and deliberately 
false as to serve as a clear warning. She had been about to ask him if he knew where the man Handy was. 
Instead, she said, �I came to say to the overseer here that a man he took on for the haymaking left my village 
as a thief and worse, not one he�d choose to have about the place. But it seems the man�s moved on.� 

She gazed calmly at Aspen until he answered, with an effort, �I know nothing about these people.� 

She had thought him, on the morning of Ogion�s death, to be a young man, a tall, handsome youth with a 
grey cloak and a silvery staff. He did not look as young as she had thought him, or he was young but 
somehow dried and withered. His stare and his voice were now openly contemptuous, and she answered him 
in Goha�s voice: �To be sure. I beg your pardon.� She wanted no trouble with him. She made to go on her 
way back to the village, but Aspen said, �Wait!� 

She waited. 

��A thief and worse,� you say, but slander�s cheap, and a woman�s tongue worse than any thief. You 
come up here to make had blood among the field hands, casting calumny and lies, the dragonseed every 
witch sows behind her. Did you think I did not know you for a witch? When I saw that foul imp that clings to 
you, do you think I did not know how it was begotten, and for what purposes? The man did well who tried to 
destroy that creature, but the job should be completed. You defied me once, across the body of the old 
wizard, and I forbore to punish you then, for his sake and in the presence of others. But now you�ve come 
too far, and I warn you, woman! I will not have you set foot on this domain. And if you cross my will or dare 
so much as speak to me again, I will have you driven from Re Albi, and off the Overfell, with the dogs at 
your heels. Have you understood me?� 

�No,� Tenar said. �I have never understood men like you. 


She turned and set off down the road. 

Something like a stroking touch went up her spine, and her hair lifted up on her head. She turned sharp 
round to see the wizard reach out his staff towards her, and the dark lightnings gather round it, and his lips 
part to speak. She thought in that moment, Because Ged has lost his magery, I thought all men had, but I was 
wrong/-And a civil voice said, �Well, well. What have we here?� 

Two of the men from Havnor had come out onto the road from the cherry orchards on the other side of it. 
They looked from Aspen to Tenar with bland and courtly expressions, as if regretting the necessity of 
preventing a wizard from laying a curse on a middle-aged widow, but really, really, it would not do. 

 


�Mistress Goha,� said the man with the gold-embroidered shirt, and bowed to her. 

The other, the bright-eyed one, saluted her also, smiling. �Mistress Goha,� he said, �is one who, like the 
King, bears her true name openly, I think, and unafraid. Living in Gont, she may prefer that we use her 
Gontish name. But knowing her deeds, I ask to do her honor; for she wore the Ring that no woman wore 
since Elfarran.� He dropped to one knee as if it were the most natural thing in the world, took Tenar�s right 
hand very lightly and quickly, and touched his forehead to her wrist. He released her and stood up, smiling 
that kind, collusive smile. 

�Ah,� said Tenar, flustered and warmed right through- �there�s all kinds of power in the world!-Thank 
you.� 

The wizard stood motionless, staring. He had closed his mouth on the curse and drawn back his staff, but 
there was still a visible darkness about it and about his eyes. 

She did not know whether he had known or had just now learned that she was Tenar of the Ring. It did 
not matter. He could not hate her more. To be a woman was her fault. Nothing could worsen or amend it, in 
his eyes; no punishment was enough. He had looked at what had been done to Therru, and approved. 

�Sir,� she said now to the older man, �anything less than honesty and openness seems dishonor to the 
king, for whom you speak-and act, as now. I�d like to honor the king, and his messengers. But my own honor 
lies in silence, until my friend releases me. I-I�m sure, my lords, that he�ll send some word to you, in time. 
Only give him time, I pray you. 

�Surely,� said the one, and the other, �As much time as he wants. And your trust, my lady, honors us 
above all.� 

 She went on down the road to Re Albi at last, shaken by 

the shock and change of things, the wizard�s flaying hatred, her own angry contempt, her terror at the sudden 
knowledge of his will and power to do her harm, the sudden end of that terror in the refuge offered by the 
envoys of the king-the men who had come in the white-sailed ship from the haven itself, the Tower of the 
Sword and the Throne, the center of right and order. Her heart lifted up in gratitude. There was indeed a king 
upon that throne, and in his crown the chiefest jewel would be the Rune of Peace. 

She liked the younger man�s face, clever and kindly, and the way he had knelt to her as to a queen, and 
his smile that had a wink hidden in it. She turned to look back. The two envoys were walking up the road to 
the mansion house with the wizard Aspen. They seemed to be conversing with him amicably, as if nothing 
had happened. 

That sank her surge of hopeful trust a bit. To be sure, they were courtiers. It wasn�t their business to 
quarrel, or to judge and disapprove. And he was a wizard, and their host�s wizard. Still, she thought, they 
needn�t have walked and talked with him quite so comfortably. 

 

The men from Havnor stayed several days with the Lord of Re Albi, perhaps hoping that the archmage 
would change his mind and come to them, but they did not seek him, nor press Tenar about where he might 
be. When they left at last, Tenar told herself that she must make up her mind what to do. There was no real 
reason for her to stay here, and two strong reasons for leaving: Aspen and Handy, neither of whom could she 
trust to let her and Therru alone. 

 Yet she found it hard to make up her mind, because it was hard to think of going. In leaving Re Albi now 
she left Ogion, lost him, as she had not lost him while she kept his house and weeded his onions. And she 
thought, �I will never dream of the sky, down there.� Here, where Kalessin had come, she was Tenar, she 
thought. Down in Middle Valley she would only be Goha again. She delayed. She said to herself, �Am I to 


fear those scoundrels, to run from them? That�s what they want me to do. Are they to make me come and go 
at their will?� She said to herself, �I�ll just finish the cheese-making.� She kept Therru always with her. And 
the days went by. 

Moss came with a tale to tell. Tenar had asked her about the wizard Aspen, not telling her the whole 
story but saying that he had threatened her-which, in fact, might well be all he had meant to do. Moss usually 
kept clear of the old lord�s domain, but she was curious about what went on there, and not unwilling to find 
the chance to chat with some acquaintances there, a woman from whom she had learned midwifery and 
others whom she had attended as healer or finder. She got them talking about the doings at the mansion 
house. They all hated Aspen and so were quite ready to talk about him, but their tales must be heard as half 
spite and fear. Still, there would be facts among the fancies. Moss herself attested that until Aspen came 
three years ago, the younger lord, the grandson, had been fit and well, though a shy, sullen man, 
�scared-like,� she said. Then about the time the young lord�s mother died, the old lord had sent to Roke for 
a wizard- �What for? With Lord Ogion not a mile away? And they�re all witchfolk themselves in the 
mansion.� 

But Aspen had come. He had paid his respects and no more to Ogion, and always, Moss said, stayed up at 
the mansion. Since then, less and less had been seen of the grandson, and it was said now that he lay day and 
night in bed, �like a sick baby, all shriveled up,� said one of the women who had been into the house on 
some errand. But the old lord, �a hundred years old, or near, or more,� Moss insisted-she had no fear of 
numbers and no respect for them-the old lord was flourishing, �full of juice,� they said. And one of the men, 
for they would have only men wait on them in the mansion, had told one of the women that the old lord had 
hired the wizard to make him live forever, and that the wizard was doing that, feeding him, the man said, off 
the grandson�s life, And the man saw no harm in it, saying, �Who wouldn�t want to live forever?� 

�Well,� Tenar said, taken aback. �That�s an ugly story. Don�t they talk about all this in the village?� 

Moss shrugged. It was a matter of �Let be� again. The doings of the powerful were not to be judged by 
the powerless, And there was the dim, blind loyalty, the rootedness in place: the old man was their lord, 
Lord of Re Albi, nobody else�s business what he did... . Moss evidently felt this herself. �Risky,� she said, 
�bound to go wrong, such a trick,� but she did not say it was wicked. 

No sign of the man Handy had been seen up at the mansion. Longing to be sure that he had left the 
Overfell, Tenar asked an acquaintance or two in the village if they had seen such a man, but she got 
unwilling and equivocal replies. They wanted no part of her affairs. �Let be. . . . Only old Fan treated her as 
a friend and fellow-villager. And that might be because his eyes were so dim he could not clearly see Therru. 

She took the child with her now when she went into the village, or any distance at all from the house. 

Therru did not find this bondage wearisome. She stayed close by Tenar as a much younger child would 
do, working with her or playing. Her play was with cat�s cradle, basket making, and with a couple of bone 
figures that Tenar had found in a little grass bag on one of Ogion�s shelves. There was an animal that 
might be a dog or a sheep, a figure that might be a woman or a man. To Tenar they had no sense of power or 
danger about them, and Moss said, �Just toys.� To Therru they were a great magic. She moved them about in 
the patterns of some silent story for hours at a time; she did not speak as she played. Sometimes she built 
houses for the person and the animal, stone cairns, huts of mud and straw. They were always in her pocket in 
their grass bag. She was learning to spin; she could hold the distaff in the burned hand and twist the 
drop-spindle with the other. They had combed the goats regularly since they had been there, and by now had 
a good sackful of silky goathair to be spun. 

�But I should be teaching her,� Tenar thought, distressed. �Teach her all, Ogion said, and what am I 


teaching her? Cooking and spinning?� Then another part of her mind said in Goha�s voice, �And are those 
not true arts, needful and noble? Is wisdom all words?� 

Still she worried over the matter, and one afternoon while Therru was pulling the goathair to clean and 
loosen it and she was carding it, in the shade of the peach tree, she said, �Therru, maybe it�s time you began 
to learn the true names of things. There is a language in which all things bear their true names, and deed and 
word are one. By speaking that tongue Segoy raised the islands from the deeps. It is the language dragons 
speak.� 

The child listened, silent. 

Tenar laid down her carding combs and picked up a small stone from the ground. �In that tongue,� she 
said, �this is tolk. � 

Therru watched what she did and repeated the word, tolk, but without voice, only forming it with her lips, 
which were drawn back a little on the right side by the scarring. 

The stone lay on Tenar�s palm, a stone. 

They were both silent. 

�Not yet,� Tenar said. �That�s not what I have to teach you now.� She let the stone fall to the ground, and 
picked up her combs and a handful of cloudy grey wool Therru had prepared for carding. �Maybe when you 
have your true name, maybe that will be the time. Not now. Now, listen. Now is the time for stories, for you 
to begin to learn the stories. I can tell you stories of the Archipelago and of the Kargad Lands. I told you a 
story I learned from my friend Aihal the Silent. Now I�ll tell you one I learned from my friend Lark when 
she told it to her children and mine. This is the story of Andaur and Avad . As long ago as forever, as far 
away as Selidor, there lived a man called Andaur, a woodcutter, who went up in the hills alone. One day, 
deep in the forest, he cut a great oak tree down. As it fell it cried out to him in a human voice. . . . 

It was a pleasant afternoon for them both. 

 But that night as she lay by the sleeping child, Tenar could not sleep. She was restless, concerned with one 
petty anxiety after another-did I fasten the pasture gate, does my hand ache from carding or is it arthritis 
beginning, and so on. Then she became very uneasy, thinking she heard noises outside the house. Why 
haven�t I got me a dog? she thought. Stupid, not to have a dog. A woman and child living alone ought to 
have a dog these days. But this is Ogion�s house! Nobody would come here to do evil. But Ogion is dead, 
dead, buried at the roots of the tree at the forest�s edge. And no one will come. Sparrowhawk�s gone, run 
away. Not even Sparrowhawk anymore, a shadow man, no good to anyone, a dead man forced to be alive, 
And I have no strength, there�s no good in me. I say the word of the Making and it dies in my mouth, it is 
meaningless. A stone. I am a woman, an old woman, weak, stupid. All I do is wrong. All I touch turns to 
ashes, shadow, stone. I am the creature of darkness, swollen with darkness. Only fire can cleanse me. Only 
fire can eat me, eat me away like-She sat up and cried out aloud in her own language, �The curse be turned, 
and turn!�-and brought her right arm out and down, pointing straight to the closed door. Then leaping out of 
bed, she went to the door, flung it open, and said into the cloudy night, �You come too late, Aspen. I was 
eaten long ago. Go clean your own house!� 

There was no answer, no sound, but a faint, sour, vile smell of burning-singed cloth or hair. 

She shut the door, set Ogion�s staff against it, and looked to see that Therru still slept. She did not sleep 
herself, that night. 

 

In the morning she took Therru into the village to ask Fan if he would want the yarn they had been spinning, 
It was an excuse to get away from the house and to be for a little while among people. The old man said he 


would be glad to weave the yarn, and they talked for a few minutes, under the great painted fan, while the 
apprentice scowled and clacked away grimly at the loom. As Tenar and Therru left Fan�s house, somebody 
dodged around the corner of the little cottage where she had lived. Something, wasps or bees, were stinging 
Tenar�s neck and head, and there was a patter of rain all round, a thundershower, but there were no clouds- 
Stones. She saw the pebbles strike the ground. Therru had stopped, startled and puzzled, looking around. A 
couple of boys ran from behind the cottage, half hiding, half showing themselves, calling out to each other, 
laughing. 

�Come along,� Tenar said steadily, and they walked to Ogion�s house. 

Tenar was shaking, and the shaking got worse as they walked. She tried to conceal it from Therru, who 
looked troubled but not frightened, not having understood what had happened. 

As soon as they entered the house, Tenar knew someone had been there while they were in the village. It 
smelled of burned meat and hair. The coverlet of their bed had been disarranged . 

When she tried to think what to do, she knew there was a spell on her. It had been laid waiting for her. She 
could not stop shaking, and her mind was confused, slow, unable to decide. She could not think. She had 
said the word, the true name of the stone, and it had been flung at her, in her face-in the face of evil, the 
hideous face- She had dared speak- She could not speak- She thought, in her own language, I cannot think in 
Hardic. I must not. 

She could think, in Kargish. Not quickly. It was as if she had to ask the girl Arha, who she had been long 
ago, to come out of the darkness and think for her. To help her. As she had helped her last night, turning the 
wizard�s curse back on him. Arha had not known a great deal of what Tenar and Goha knew, but she had 
known how to curse, and how to live in the dark, and how to be silent. 

It was hard to do that, to be silent. She wanted to cry out. She wanted to talk-to go to Moss and tell her 
what had happened, why she must go, to say good-bye at least. She tried to say to Heather, �The goats are 
yours now, Heather,� and she managed to say that in Hardic, so that Heather would understand, but Heather 
did not under-stand. She stared and laughed. �Oh, they�re Lord Ogion�s goats!� she said. 

�Then-you-� Tenar tried to say �go on keeping them for him,� but a deadly sickness came into her and 
she heard her voice saying shrilly, �fool, halfwit, imbecile, woman!� Heather stared and stopped laughing. 
Tenar covered her own mouth with her hand. She took Heather and turned her to look at the cheeses ripening 
in the milking shed, and pointed to them and to Heather, back and forth, until Heather nodded vaguely and 
laughed again because she was acting so queer. 

Tenar nodded to Therru-come!-and went into the house, where the foul smell was stronger, making 
Therru cower. 

Tenar fetched out their packs and their travel shoes. In her pack she put her spare dress and shifts, 
Therru�s two old dresses and the half-made new one and the spare cloth; the spindle whorls she had carved 
for herself and Therru; and a little food and a clay bottle of water for the way. In Therru�s pack went 
Therru�s best baskets, the bone person and the bone animal in their grass bag, some feathers, a little 
maze-mat Moss had given her, and a bag of nuts and raisins. 

She wanted to say, �Go water the peach tree,� but dared not. She took the child out and showed her. 
Therru watered the tiny shoot carefully. 

They swept and straightened up the house, working fast, in silence. 

Tenar set a jug back on the shelf and saw on the other end of the shelf the three great books, Ogion�s 
books. 

Arha saw them and they were nothing to her, big leather boxes full of paper. 


But Tenar stared at them and bit her knuckle, frowning with the effort to decide, to know what to do, and 
to know how to carry them. She could not carry them. But she must. They could not stay here in the 
desecrated house, the house where hatred had come in. They were his. Ogion�s. Ged�s. 

 

Hers. The knowledge. Teach her all! She emptied their wool and yarn from the sack she had meant to carry 
it in and put the books in, one atop the other, and tied the neck of the bag with a leather strap with a loop to 
hold it by. Then she said, �We must go now, Therru.� She spoke in Kargish, but the child�s name was the 
same, it was a Kargish word, flame, flaming; and she came, asking no questions, carrying her little hoard in 
the pack on her back. 

They took up their walking sticks, the hazel shoot and the alder branch. They left Ogion�s staff beside the 
door in the dark corner. They left the door of the house wide open to the wind from the sea. 

 

An animal sense guided Tenar away from the fields and away from the hill road she had come by. She took 
a shortcut down the steep-falling pastures, holding Therru�s hand, to the wagon road that zigzagged down to 
Gont Port. She knew that if she met Aspen she was lost, and thought he might be waiting for her on the way. 
But not, maybe, on this way. 

After a mile or so of the descent she began to be able to think. What she thought first was that she had 
taken the right road. For the Hardic words were coming back to her, and after a while, the true words, so that 
she stooped and picked up a stone and held it in her hand, saying in her mind, tolk; and she put that stone in 
her pocket. She looked out into the vast levels of air and cloud and said in her mind, once, Kalessin. And her 
mind cleared, as that air was clear. 

They came into a long cutting shadowed by high, grassy banks and outcrops of rock, where she was a 
little uneasy. As they came out onto the turn they saw the dark-blue bay below them, and coming into it 
between the Armed Cliffs a beautiful ship under full sail. Tenar had feared the last such ship, but not this one. 
She wanted to run down the road to meet it. 

That she could not do. They went at Therru�s pace. It was a better pace than it had been two months ago, 
and going downhill made it easy, too, But the ship ran to meet them. There was a magewind in her sails; she 
came across the bay like a flying swan. She was in port before Tenar and Therru were halfway down the next 
long turning of the road. 

 

Towns of any size at all were very strange places to Tenar. She had not lived in them. She had seen the 
greatest city in Earthsea, Havnor, once, for a while; and she had sailed into Gont Port with Ged, years ago, 
but they had climbed on up the road to the Overfell without pausing in the streets. The only other town she 
knew was Valmouth, where her daughter lived, a sleepy, sunny little harbor town where a ship trading from 
the Andrades was a great event, and most of the conversation of the inhabitants concerned dried fish. 

She and the child came into the streets of Gont Port when the sun was still well above the western sea. 
Therru had walked fifteen miles without complaint and without being worn out, though certainly she was 
very tired . Tenar was tired too, having not slept the night before, and having been much distressed; and also 
Ogion�s books had been a heavy burden. Halfway down the road she had put them into the backpack, and 
the food and clothing into the woolsack, which was better, but not all that much better. So they came 
trudging among outlying houses to the landgate of the city, where the road, coming between two carved 
stone dragons, turned into a street. There a man, the guard of the gate, eyed them. Therru bent her burned 
face down towards the shoulder and hid her burned hand under the apron of her dress. 


�Will you be going to a house in town, mistress?� the guard asked, peering at the child . 

Tenar did not know what to say. She did not know there were guards at city gates. She had nothing to pay 
a toll-keeper or an innkeeper. She did not know a soul in Gont Port-except, she thought now, the wizard, the 
one who had come up to bury Ogion, what was he called? But she did not know what he was called. She 
stood there with her mouth open, like Heather. 

�Go on, go on,� the guard said, bored, and turned away. 

She wanted to ask him where she would find the road south across the headlands, the coast road to 
Valmouth; but she dared not waken his interest again, lest he decide she was after all a vagrant or a witch or 
whatever he and the stone dragons were supposed to keep out of Gont Port. So they went on between 
the dragons-Therru looked up, a little, to see them-and tramped along on cobblestones, more and more 
amazed, bewildered, and abashed. It did not seem to Tenar that anybody or anything in the world had been 
kept out of Gont Port. It was all here. Tall houses of stone, wagons, drays, carts, cattle, donkeys, marketplaces, 
shops, crowds, people, people-the farther they went the more people there were. Therru clung to 
Tenar�s hand, sidling, hiding her face with her hair. Tenar clung to Therru�s hand. 

She did not see how they could stay here, so the only thing to do was get started south and go till 
nightfall-all too soon now-hoping to camp in the woods. Tenar picked out a broad woman in a broad white 
apron who was closing the shutters of a shop, and crossed the street, resolved to ask her for the road south 
out of the city. The woman�s firm, red face looked pleasant enough, but as Tenar was getting up her courage 
to speak to her, Therru clutched her hard as if trying to hide herself against her, and looking up she saw 
coming down the street towards her the man with the leather cap. He saw her at the same instant. He 
stopped. 

Tenar seized Therru�s arm and half dragged, half swung her round. �Come!� she said, and strode straight 
on past the man. Once she had put him behind her she walked faster, going downhill towards the flare and 
dark of the sunset water and the docks and quais at the foot of the steep street. Therru ran with her, gasping 
as she had gasped after she was burned. 

Tall masts rocked against the red and yellow sky. The ship, sails furled, lay against the stone pier, beyond 
an oared galley. 

Tenar looked back. The man was following them, close behind. He was not hurrying. 

She ran out onto the pier, but after a way Therru stumbled and could not go on, unable to get her breath. 
Tenar picked her up, and the child held to her, hiding her face in Tenar�s shoulder. But Tenar could scarcely 
move, thus laden. Her legs shook under her. She took a step, and another, and another. She came to the little 
wooden bridge they had laid from the pier to the ship�s deck. She laid her hand on its rail. 

A sailor on deck, a bald, wiry fellow, looked her over. �What�s wrong, miss�s?� he said. 

�Is-Is the ship from Havnor?� 

�From the King�s City, sure. 

�Let me aboard!� 

�Well, I can�t do that,� the man said, grinning, but his eyes shifted; he was looking at the man who had 
come to stand beside Tenar. 

�You don�t have to run away,� Handy said to her. �I don�t mean you any harm. I don�t want to hurt you. 
You don�t understand. I was the one got help for her, wasn�t I? I was really sorry, what happened. I want to 
help you with her.� He put out his hand as if drawn irresistibly to touch Therru. Tenar could not move. She 
had promised Therru that he would never touch her again. She saw the hand touch the child�s bare, flinching 
arm. 


�What do you want with her?� said another voice. Another sailor had taken the place of the bald one: a 
young man. Tenar thought he was her son. 

Handy was quick to speak. �She�s got-she took my kid. My niece. It�s mine. She witched it, she run off 
with it, see- She could not speak at all. The words were gone from her again, taken from her. The young 
sailor was not her son. His face was thin and stern, with clear eyes. Looking at him, she found the words: 
�Let me come aboard. Please!� 

The young man held out his hand. She took it, and he brought her across the gangway onto the deck of the 
ship. 

�Wait there,� he said to Handy, and to her, �Come with me.� 

But her legs would not hold her up. She sank down in a heap on the deck of the ship from Havnor, 
dropping the heavy sack but clinging to the child. �Don�t let him take her, oh, don�t let them have her, not 
again, not again, not again!� 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dolphin 

She would not let go the child, she would not give the child to them. They were all men aboard the ship. 
Only after a long time did she begin to be able to take into her mind what they said, what had been done, 
what was happening. When she understood who the young man was, the one she had thought was her son, it 
seemed as if she had understood it all along, only she had not been able to think it. She had not been able to 
think anything. 

He had come back onto the ship from the docks and now stood talking to a grey-haired man, the ship�s 
master by the look of him, near the gangplank. He glanced over at Tenar, whom they had let stay crouching 
with Therru in a corner of the deck between the railing and a great windlass. The long day�s weariness had 
won out over Therru�s fear; she was fast asleep, close against Tenar, with her little pack for a pillow and her 
cloak for a blanket. 

Tenar got up slowly, and the young man came to her at once. She straightened her skirts and tried to 
smooth her hair back. �I am Tenar of Atuan,� she said. He stood still. She said, �I think you are the king.� 

He was very young, younger than her son, Spark. He could hardly be twenty yet. But there was a look to 
him that was not young at all, something in his eyes that made her think: He has been through the fire. 

�My name is Lebannen of Enlad, my lady,� he said, and he was about to bow or even kneel to her. She 
caught his hands so that they stood there face to face. �Not to me, she said, �nor I to you!� 

He laughed in surprise, and held her hands while he stared at her frankly. �How did you know I sought 
you? Were you coming to me, when that man-?� 

�No, no. I was running away-from him-from-from ruffians- I was trying to go home, that�s all.� 

�To Atuan?� 

�Oh, no! To my farm. In Middle Valley. On Gont, here.� She laughed too, a laugh with tears in it. The 
tears could be wept now, and would be wept. She let go the king�s hands so that she could wipe her eyes. 

�Where is it, Middle Valley?� he asked. �South and east, around the headlands there. Valmouth is the 
port. 


�We�ll take you there,� he said, with delight in being able to offer it, to do it. 

She smiled and wiped her eyes, nodding acceptance. �A glass of wine. Some food, some rest,� he said, 
�and a bed for your child.� The ship�s master, listening discreetly, gave orders. The bald sailor she 
remembered from what seemed a long time ago came forward. He was going to pick up Therru. Tenar stood 
between him and the child. She could not let him touch her. �I�ll carry her,� she said, her voice strained high. 

�There�s the stairs there, miss�s. I�ll do it,� said the sailor, and she knew he was kind, but she could not let 
him touch Therru. 

�Let me,� the young man, the king, said, and with a glance at her for permission, he knelt, gathered up the 
sleeping child, and carried her to the hatchway and care-fully down the ladder-stairs. Tenar followed. 

He laid her on a bunk in a tiny cabin, awkwardly, tenderly. He tucked the cloak around her. Tenar let him 
do so. 

In a larger cabin that ran across the stern of the ship, with a long window looking out over the twilit bay, 
he asked her to sit at the oaken table. He took a tray from the sailor boy that brought it, poured out red wine 
in goblets of heavy glass, offered her fruit and cakes. 

She tasted the wine. 

�It�s very good, but not the Dragon Year,� she said. 

He looked at her in unguarded surprise, like any boy. 

�From Enlad, not the Andrades,� he said meekly. 

�It�s very fine,� she assured him, drinking again. She took a cake. It was shortbread, very rich, not sweet. 
The green and amber grapes were sweet and tart. The vivid tastes of the food and wine were like the ropes 
that moored the ship, they moored her to the world, to her mind again. 

�I was very frightened,� she said by way of apology. �I think I�ll be myself again soon. Yesterday-no, 
today, this morning-there was a-a spell-� It was almost impossible to say the word, she stammered at it: �A 
c-curse-laid on me. It took my speech, and my wits, I think. And we ran from that, but we ran right to the 
man, the man who-� She looked up despairingly at the young man listening to her. His grave eyes let her say 
what must be said. �He was one of the people who crippled the child. He and her parents. They raped her and 
beat her and burned her; these things happen, my lord. These things happen to children. And he keeps 
following her, to get at her. And-� 

She stopped herself, and drank wine, making herself taste its flavor. 

�And so from him I ran to you. To the haven.� She looked about at the low, carved beams of the cabin, 
the polished table, the silver tray, the thin, quiet face of the young man. His hair was dark and soft, his skin 
a clear bronze-red; he was dressed well and plainly, with no chain or ring or outward mark of authority. But 
he looked the way a king should look, she thought. 

�I�m sorry I let the man go,� he said. �But he can be found again. Who was it laid the spell on you?� 

�A wizard.� She would not say the name. She did not want to think about all that. She wanted them all 
behind her. No retribution, no pursuit. Leave them to their hatreds, put them behind her, forget. 

Lebannen did not press, but he asked, �Will you be safe from these men on your farm?� 

�I think so. If I hadn�t been so tired, so confused by the-by the-so confused in my mind, so that I couldn�t 
think, I wouldn�t have been afraid of Handy. What could he have done? With all the people about, in the 
street? I shouldn�t have run from him. But all I could feel was her fear. She�s so little, all she can do is fear 
him. She�ll have to learn not to fear him. I have to teach her that ...� She was wandering. Thoughts came into 
her head in Kargish. Had she been talking in Kargish? He would think she was mad, an old mad woman 
babbling. She glanced up at him furtively. His dark eyes were not on her; he gazed at the flame of the glass 


lamp that hung low over the table, a little, still, clear flame. His face was too sad for a young man�s face. 

�You came to find him,� she said. �The archmage. Sparrowhawk.� 

�Ged,� he said, looking at her with a faint smile. �You, and he, and I go by our true names. 

�You and I, yes. But he, only to you and me.� 

He nodded. 

�He�s in danger from envious men, men of ill will, and he has no-no defense, now. You know that?� 

She could not bring herself to be plainer, but Lebannen said, �He told me that his power as a mage was 
gone. Spent in the act that saved me, and all of us. But it was hard to believe. I wanted not to believe him.�� 

�I too, But it is so. And so he-� Again she hesitated. �He wants to be alone until his hurts are healed,� she 
said at last, cautiously. 

Lebannen said, �He and I were in the dark land, the dry land, together. We died together. Together we 
crossed the mountains there. You can come back across the mountains. There is a way. He knew it. But the 
name of the mountains is Pain. The stones . . . The stones cut, and the cuts are long to heal.� 

He looked down at his hands. She thought of Ged�s hands, scored and gashed, clenched on their wounds. 
Holding the cuts close, closed. 

Her own hand closed on the small stone in her pocket, the word she had picked up on the steep road. 

�Why does he hide from me?�� the young man cried in grief. Then, quietly, �I hoped indeed to see him. 
But if he doesn�t wish it, that�s the end of it, of course.� She recognized the courtliness, the civility, the 
dignity of the messengers from Havnor, and appreciated it; she knew its worth. But she loved him for his 
grief. 

�Surely he�ll come to you. Only give him time. He was so badly hurt-everything taken from him- But 
when he spoke of you, when he said your name, oh, then I saw him for a moment as he was-as he will be 
again- All pride!�� 

�Pride?�� Lebannen repeated, as if startled. 

�Yes. Of course, pride. Who should be proud, if not he?� 

�I always thought of him as- He was so patient,� Lebannen said, and then laughed at the inadequacy of 
his description. 

�Now he has no patience,� she said, �and is hard on himself beyond all reason. There�s nothing we can do 
for him, I think, except let him go his own way and find himself at the end of his tether, as they say on Gont 
All at once she was at the end of her own tether, so weary she felt ill. �I think I must rest now,�� she said. 

He rose at once. �Lady Tenar, you say you fled from one enemy and found another; but I came seeking a 
friend, and found another.� � She smiled at his wit and kindness. What a nice boy he is, she thought. 

 

The ship was all astir when she woke: creaking and groaning of timbers, thud of running feet overhead, 
rattle of canvas, sailors� shouts. Therru was hard to waken and woke dull, perhaps feverish, though she was 
always so warm that Tenar found it hard to judge her fevers. Remorseful for having dragged the fragile child 
fifteen miles on foot and for all that had happened yesterday, Tenar tried to cheer her by telling her that they 
were in a ship, and that there was a real king on the ship, and that the little room they were in was the king�s 
own room; that the ship was taking them home, to the farm, and Aunty Lark would be waiting for them at 
home, and maybe Sparrowhawk would be there too. Not even that roused Therru�s interest. She was blank, 
inert, mute. 

On her small, thin arm Tenar saw a mark-four fingers, red, like a brand, as from a bruising grip. But 
Handy had not gripped her, he had only touched her. Tenar had told her, had promised her that he would 


never touch her again. The promise had been broken. Her word meant nothing. What word meant anything, 
against deaf violence? 

She bent down and kissed the marks on Therru�s arm. 

�I wish I�d had time to finish your red dress,� she said. �The king would probably like to see it. But then, 
I suppose people don�t wear their best clothes on a ship, even kings.� 

Therru sat on the bunk, her head bent down, and did not answer. Tenar brushed her hair. It was growing 
out thick at last, a silky black curtain over the burned parts of the scalp. �Are you hungry, birdlet? You didn�t 
have any supper last night. Maybe the king will give us breakfast. He gave me cakes and grapes last night.� 

No response. 

When Tenar said it was time to leave the room, she obeyed. Up on deck she stood with her head bent to 
her shoulder. She did not look up at the white sails full of the morning wind, nor at the sparkling water, nor 
back at Gont Mountain rearing its bulk and majesty of forest, cliff, and peak into the sky. She did not look up 
when Lebannen spoke to her. 

�Therru,� Tenar said softly, kneeling by her, �when a king speaks to you, you answer. 

She was silent. 

The expression of Lebannen's face as he looked at her was unreadable. A mask perhaps, a civil mask for 
revulsion, shock. But his dark eyes were steady. He touched the child�s arm very lightly, saying, �It must be 
strange for you, to wake up in the middle of the sea." 

She would eat only a little fruit. When Tenar asked her if she wanted to go back to the cabin, she nodded. 
Reluctant, Tenar left her curled up in the bunk and went back up on deck. 

The ship was passing between the Armed Cliffs, towering grim walls that seemed to lean above the sails. 
Bowmen on guard in little forts like mud-swallows� nests high on the cliffs looked down at them on deck, 
and the sailors yelled cheerfully up at them. �Way for the king!�� they shouted, and the reply came down not 
much louder than the calling of swallows from the heights, �The king!" 

Lebannen stood at the high prow with the ship�s master and an elderly, lean, narrow-eyed man in the grey 
cloak of a mage of Roke Island. Ged had worn such a cloak, a clean, fine one, on the day he and she brought 
the Ring of ErrethAkbe to the Tower of the Sword; an old one, stained and dirty and travelworn, had been all 
his blanket on the cold stone of the Tombs of Atuan, and on the dirt of the desert mountains when they had 
crossed those mountains together. She was thinking of that as the foam flew by the ship�s sides and the high 
cliffs fell away behind. 

When the ship was out past the last reefs and had begun to swing eastward, the three men came to her. 
Lebannen said, �My lady, this is the Master Windkey of Roke Island.� 

The mage bowed, looking at her with praise in his keen eyes, and curiosity also; a man who liked to know 
which way the wind blew, she thought. 

�Now I needn�t hope the fair weather will hold, but can count on it,�� she said to him. 

�I�m only cargo on a day like this,�� said the mage. "Besides, with a sailor like Master Serrathen handling 
the ship, who needs a weatherworker?� 

We are so polite, she thought, all Ladies and Lords and Masters, all bows and compliments. She glanced 
at the young king. He was looking at her, smiling but reserved. 

She felt as she had felt in Havnor as a girl: a barbarian, uncouth among their smoothnesses. But because 
she was not a girl now, she was not awed, but only wondered at how men ordered their world into this dance 
of masks, and how easily a woman might learn to dance it. 

It would take them only the day, they told her, to sail to Valmouth. They would make port there by late 


afternoon, with this fair wind in the sails. 

Still very weary from the long distress and strain of the day before, she was content to sit in the seat the 
bald sailor contrived for her out of a straw mattress and a piece of sailcloth, and watch the waves and the 
gulls, and see the outline of Gont Mountain, blue and dreamy in the noon light, changing as they skirted its 
steep shores only a mile or two out from land. She brought Therru up to be in the sunshine, and the child lay 
beside her, watching and dozing. 

A sailor, a very dark man, toothless, came on bare feet with soles like hooves and hideously gnarled toes, 
and put something down on the canvas near Therru. �For the little girl,�� he said hoarsely, and went off at 
once, though not far off. He looked around hopefully now and then from his work to see if she liked his gift 
and then pretended he had not looked around. Therru would not touch the little cloth-wrapped packet. Tenar 
had to open it. It was an exquisite carving of a dolphin, in bone or ivory, the length of her thumb. 

�It can live in your grass bag,� Tenar said, �with the others, the bone people.� 

At that Therru came to life enough to fetch out her grass bag and put the dolphin in it. But Tenar had to go 
thank the humble giver. Therru would not look at him or speak. After a while she asked to go back to the 
cabin, and Tenar left her there with the bone person, the bone animal, and the dolphin for company. 

It�s so easy, she thought with rage, it�s so easy for Handy 

to take the sunlight from her, take the ship and the king and her childhood from her, and it�s so hard to give 
them back! A year I�ve spent trying to give them back to her, and with one touch he takes them and throws 
them away. And what good does it do him-what�s his prize, his power? Is power that-an emptiness? 

She joined the king and the mage at the ship�s railing. The sun was well to the west now, and the ship 
drove through a glory of light that made her think of her dream of flying with the dragons. 

�Lady Tenar,� the king said, �I give you no message for our friend. It seems to me that to do so is to lay 
a burden on you, and also to encroach upon his freedom; and I don�t want to do either. I am to be crowned 
within the month. If it were he that held the crown, my reign would begin as my heart desires. But whether 
he�s there or not, he brought me to my kingdom. He made me king. I will not forget it.� 

�I know you will not forget it,� she said gently. He was so intense, so serious, armored in the formality of 
his rank and yet vulnerable in his honesty, the purity of his will. Her heart yearned to him. He thought he had 
learned pain, but he would learn it again and again, all his life, and forget 

 

 And therefore he would not, like Handy, do the easy thing to do. 

�I�ll bear a message willingly,� she said. �It�s no burden. Whether he�d hear it is up to him.� 

The Master Windkey grinned. �It always was,�� he said. �Whatever he did was up to him.� 

�You�ve known him a long time?� 

�Even longer than you, my lady. Taught him,�� said the mage. �What I could. . . . He came to the School 
on Roke, you know, as a boy, with a letter from Ogion telling us that he had great power. But the first time I 
had him out in a boat, to learn how to speak to the wind, you know, he raised up a waterspout. I saw then 
what we were in for. I thought, Either he�ll be drowned before he�s sixteen, or he�ll be archmage before he�s 
forty. . . . Or I like to think I thought it.� 

�Is he still archmage?�� Tenar asked. The question seemed baldly ignorant, and when it was greeted by a 
silence, she feared it had been worse than ignorant. 

The mage said finally, �There is now no Archmage of Roke. � His tone was exceedingly cautious and 
precise. 

She dared not ask what he meant. 


�I think,� said the king, �that the Healer of the Rune of Peace may be part of any council of this realm; 
don�t you think so, sir?� 

After another pause and evidently with a little struggle, the mage said, �Certainly.�� 

The king waited, but he said no more. 

Lebannen looked out at the bright water and spoke as if he began a tale: �When he and I came to Roke 
from the farthest west, borne by the dragon He paused, and the dragon�s name spoke itself in Tenar�s mind, 
Kalessin, like a struck gong. 

�The dragon left me there, but bore him away. The keeper of the door of the House of Roke said then, �He 
has done with doing. He goes home.� And before that-on the beach of Selid or-he bade me leave his staff, 
saying he was no mage now. So the Masters of Roke took counsel to choose a new archmage. 

�They took me among them, that I might learn what it might be well for a king to know about the Council 
of the Wise. And also I was one of them to replace one of their number: Thorion, the Summoner, whose art 
was turned against him by that great evil which my lord Sparrowhawk found and ended. When we were 
there, in the dry land, between the wall and the mountains, I saw Thorion. My lord spoke to him, telling him 
the way back to life across the wall. But he did not take it. He did not come back.�� 

The young man�s strong, fine hands held hard to the ship�s rail. He still gazed at the sea as he spoke. He 
was silent for a minute and then took up his story. 

�So I made out the number, nine, who meet to choose the new archmage. 

�They are . . . they are wise men,� he said, with a glance at Tenar. �Not only learned in their art, but 
knowledgeable men. They use their differences, as I had seen before, to make their decision strong. But this 
time . . . 

�The fact is,� said the master windkey, seeing Lebannen unwilling to seem to criticize the Masters of 
Roke, �we were all difference and no decision. We could come to no agreement. Because the archmage 
wasn�t dead-was alive, you see, and yet no mage-and yet still a dragonlord, it seemed. . . . And because our 
Changer was still shaken from the turning of his own art on him, and believed that the Summoner would 
return from death, and begged us to wait for him. . . . And because the Master Patterner would not speak at 
all. He is a Karg, my lady, like yourself; did you know that? He came to us from Karego-At. � � His keen 
eyes watched her: which way does the wind blow? �So because of all that, we found ourselves at a loss. 
When the Doorkeeper asked for the names of those from whom we would choose, not a name was spoken. 
Everybody looked at everybody else 

�I looked at the ground,� Lebannen said. 

�So at last we looked to the one who knows the names: 

the Master Namer. And he was watching the Patterner, who hadn�t said a word, but sat there among his trees 
like a stump. It�s in the Grove we meet, you know, among those trees whose roots are deeper than the islands. 
It was late in the evening by then. Sometimes there�s a light among those trees, but not that night. It was dark, 
no starlight, a cloudy sky above the leaves, And the Patterner stood up and spoke then-but in his own 
language, not in the Old Speech, nor in Hardic, but in Kargish. Few of us knew it or even knew what tongue 
it was, and we didn�t know what to think. But the Namer told us what the Patterner had said. He said: 

A woman on Gont. � 

He stopped. He was no longer looking at her. After a bit she said, �Nothing more?� 

�Not a word more. When we pressed him, he stared at us and couldn�t answer; for he�d been in the vision, 
you see-he�d been seeing the shape of things, the pattern; and it�s little of that can ever be put in words, and 
less into ideas. He knew no more what to think of what he�d said than the rest of us. But it was all we had.� 


The Masters of Roke were teachers, after all, and the Windkey was a very good teacher; he couldn�t help 
but make his story clear. Clearer perhaps than he wanted. He glanced once again at Tenar, and away. 

�So, you see, it seemed we should come to Gont. But for what? Seeking whom? �A woman�-not much to 
go on! Evidently this woman is to guide us, show us the way, somehow, to our archmage. And at once, as 
you may think, my lady, you were spoken of-for what other woman on Gont had we ever heard of? It is no 
great island, but yours is a great fame. Then one of us said, �She would lead us to Ogion.� But we all knew 
that Ogion had long ago refused to be archmage, and surely would not accept now that he was old and ill. 
And indeed Ogion was dying as we spoke, I think. Then another said, �But she�d lead us also to Sparrowhawk!� 
And then we were truly in the dark.� 

�Truly,� Lebannen said. �For it began to rain, there among the trees.� He smiled. �I had thought I�d never 
hear rain fall again, It was a great joy to me. 

�Nine of us wet,� said the Windkey, �and one of us happy.� 

Tenar laughed. She could not help but like the man. If he was so wary of her, it behooved her to be wary 
of him; but to Lebannen, and in Lebannen�s presence, only candor would do. 

�Your �woman on Gont� can�t be me, then, for I will not lead you to Sparrowhawk.� 

�It was my opinion,� the mage said with apparent and perhaps real candor of his own, �that it couldn�t be 
you, my lady. For one thing, he would have said your name, surely, in the vision. Very few are those who 
bear their true names openly! But I am charged by the Council of Roke to ask you if you know of any 
woman on this isle who might be the one we seek-sister or mother to a man of power, or even his teacher; for 
there are witches very wise in their way. Maybe Ogion knew such a woman? They say he knew every soul 
on this island, for all he lived alone and wandered in the wilderness. I wish he were alive to aid us now! 

She had thought already of the fisherwoman of Ogion�s story. But that woman had been old when Ogion 
knew her, years ago, and must be dead by now. Though dragons, she thought, lived very long lives, it was 
said. 

She said nothing for a while, and then only, �I know no one of that sort.� 

She could feel the mage�s controlled impatience with her. What�s she holding out for? What is it she 
wants? he was thinking, no doubt. And she wondered why it was she could not tell him. His deafness 
silenced her. She could not even tell him he was deaf. 

�So,� she said at last, �there is no archmage of Earthsea. But there is a king.�� 

�In whom our hope and trust are well founded,� the mage said with a warmth that became him well. 
Lebannen, watching and listening, smiled. 

�In these past years,� Tenar said, hesitant, �there have been many troubles, many miseries. My-the little 
girl- Such things have been all too common. And I have heard men and women of power speak of the 
waning, or the changing, of their power. 

�That one whom the archmage and my lord defeated in the dry land, that Cob, caused untold harm and 
ruin. We shall be repairing our art, healing our wizards and our wizardry, for a long time yet,� the mage said, 
decisively. 

�I wonder if there might be more to be done than repairing and healing,� she said, �though that too, of 
course- But I wonder, could it be that . . . that one such as Cob could have such power because things were 
already altering . . . and that a change, a great change, has been taking place, has taken place? And that it�s 
because of that change that we have a king again in Earthsea-perhaps a king rather than an archmage?�� 

The Windkey looked at her as if he saw a very distant storm cloud on the uttermost horizon. He even 
raised his right hand in the hint, the first sketch, of a wind binding spell, and then lowered it again. He smiled. 


�Don�t be afraid, my lady,� he said. �Roke, and the Art Magic, will endure. Our treasure is well guarded!� 

�Tell Kalessin that,�� she said, suddenly unable to endure the utter unconsciousness of his disrespect. It 
made him stare, of course. He heard the dragon�s name. But it did not 

make him hear her. How could he, who had never listened to a woman since his mother sang him his last 
cradle song, hear her? 

�Indeed,� said Lebannen, �Kalessin came to Roke, which is said to be defended utterly from dragons; 
and not through any spell of my lord�s, for he had no magery then. . . . But I don�t think, Master Windkey, 
that Lady Tenar was afraid for herself.�� 

The mage made an earnest effort to amend his offense. �I�m sorry, my lady,�� he said, �I spoke as to an 
ordinary woman. 

She almost laughed. She could have shaken him. She said only, indifferently, �My fears are ordinary 
fears.� It was no use; he could not hear her. 

But the young king was silent, listening. 

A sailor boy up in the dizzy, swaying world of the masts and sails and rigging overhead called out clear 
and sweet, �Town there round the point!�� And in a minute those down on deck saw the little huddle of slate 
roofs, the spires of blue smoke, a few glass windows catching the westering sun, and the docks and piers of 
Valmouth on its bay of satiny blue water. 

�Shall I take her in or will you talk her in, my lord?�� asked the calm ship�s-master, and the Windkey 
replied, �Sail her in, master. I don�t want to have to deal with all that flotsam!�-waving his hand at the 
dozens of fishing craft that littered the bay. So the king�s ship, like a swan among ducklings, came tacking 
slowly in, hailed by every boat she passed . 

Tenar looked along the docks, but there was no other seagoing vessel. 

�I have a sailor son,�� she said to Lebannen. �I thought his ship might be in.�� 

�What is his ship?� 

�He was third mate aboard the Gull of Eskel, but that was more than two years ago. He may have changed 
ships. He�s a restless man.�� She smiled. �When I first saw you, I thought you were my son. You�re nothing 
alike, only in being tall, and thin, and young. And I was confused, frightened. . . . Ordinary fears.� 

The mage had gone up on the master�s station in the prow, and she and Lebannen stood alone. 

�There is too much ordinary fear,� he said. 

It was her only chance to speak to him alone, and the words came out hurried and uncertain-� �1 wanted to 
say- but there was no use-but couldn�t it be that there�s a woman on Gont, I don�t know who, I have no idea, 
but it could be that there is, or will be, or may be, a woman, and that they seek-that they need-her. Is it 
impossible?� 

He listened. He was not deaf. But he frowned, intent, as if trying to understand a foreign language. And 
he said only, under his breath, �It may be.� 

A fisherwoman in her tiny dinghy bawled up, �Where from?�� and the boy in the rigging called back like 
a crowing cock, �From the King�s City!� 

�What is this ship�s name?� Tenar asked. �My son will ask what ship I sailed on. 

�Dolphin, � Lebannen answered, smiling at her. My son, my king, my dear boy, she thought. How I�d 
like to keep you nearby! 

�I must go get my little one,�' � she said. 

�How will you get home?� 

�Afoot. It�s only a few miles up the valley.� She pointed past the town, inland, where Middle Valley lay 


broad and sunlit between two arms of the mountain, like a lap. �The village is on the river, and my farm�s a 
half mile from the 

village. It�s a pretty corner of your kingdom.� 

�But will you be safe?� 

�Oh, yes. I�ll spend tonight with my daughter here in Valmouth, And in the village they�re all to be 
depended on. I won�t be alone.� 

Their eyes met for a moment, but neither spoke the name they both thought. 

�Will they be coming again, from Roke?� she asked. �Looking for the �woman on Gont�-or for him?�� 

�Not for him. That, if they propose again, I will forbid,� Lebannen said, not realizing how much he told 
her in those three words. �But as for their search for a new archmage, or for the woman of the Patterner�s s 
vision, yes, that may bring them here. And perhaps to you. 

�They�ll be welcome at Oak Farm,� she said. �Though not as welcome as you would be." 

�I will come when I can,� he said, a little sternly; and a little wistfully, �if I can.� 

 

 

 

 

 

Home 

Most of the people of Valmouth came down to the docks to see the ship from Havnor, when they heard that 
the king was aboard, the new king, the young king that the new songs were about. They didn�t know the new 
songs yet, but they knew the old ones, and old Relli came with his harp and sang a piece of the Deed of 
Morred, for a king of Earthsea would be the heir of Morred for certain. Presently the king himself came on 
deck, as young and tall and handsome as could be, and with him a mage of Roke, and a woman and a little 
girl in old cloaks not much better than beggars, but he treated them as if they were a queen and a princess, so 
maybe that�s what they were. �Maybe it�s his mother,� said Shinny, trying to see over the heads of the men 
in front of her, and then her friend Apple clutched her arm and said in a kind of whispered shriek, �It is-it�s 
mother!� 

�Whose mother?� said Shinny, and Apple said, �Mine. And that�s Therru.� But she did not push forward 
in the crowd, even when an officer of the ship came ashore to invite old Relli aboard to play for the king. She 
waited with the others. She saw the king receive the notables of Val-mouth, and heard Relli sing for him. 
She watched him bid his guests farewell, for the ship was going to stand out to sea again, people said, before 
night fell, and be on her way 

home to Havnor, The last to come across the gangplank were Therru and Tenar. To each the king gave the 
formal embrace, laying cheek to cheek, kneeling tO embrace Therru. �Ah!� said the crowd on the dock. The 
sun was setting in a mist of gold, laying a great gold track across the bay, as the two came down the railed 
gangplank. Tenar lugged a heavy pack and bag; Therru�s face was bent down and hidden by her hair. The 
gangplank was run in, and the sailors leapt to the rigging, and the officers shouted, and the ship Dolphin 
turned on her way. Then Apple made her way through the crowd at last. 

�Hello, mother,� she said, and Tenar said, �Hello, daughter.� They kissed, and Apple picked up Therru 
and said, �How you�ve grown! You�re twice the girl you were. Come on, come on home with me. 

But Apple was a little shy with her mother, that evening, in the pleasant house of her young merchant 
husband. She gazed at her several times with a thoughtful, almost a wary look. �It never meant a thing to me, 
you know, mother,� she said at the door of Tenar�s bedroom-�all that-the Rune of peace-and you bringing 


the Ring to Havnor. It was just like one of the songs. A thousand years ago! But it really was you, wasn�t it?� 

�It was a girl from Atuan,� Tenar said. �A thousand years ago. I think I could sleep for a thousand years, 
just now. 

�Go to bed, then.� Apple turned away, then turned back, lamp in hand. �King-kisser,� she said. 

�Get along with you,� said Tenar. 

 

Apple and her husband kept Tenar a couple of days, but after that she was determined tO go to the farm. So 
Apple walked with her and Therru up along the placid, silvery Kaheda. Summer was turning to autumn. The 
sun was still hot, but the wind was cool. The foliage of trees had a weary, dusty look to it, and the fields were 
cut or in harvest. 

Apple spoke of how much stronger Therru was, and how sturdily she walked now. 

�I wish you�d seen her at Re Albi,� Tenar said, �before-�� and stopped. She had decided not to worry her 
daughter with all that. 

�What did happen? � � Apple asked, so clearly resolved to know that Tenar gave in and answered in a low 
voice, �One of them.� 

Therru was a few yards ahead of them, long-legged in her outgrown dress, hunting blackberries in the 
hedgerows as she walked. 

�Her father?� Apple asked, sickened at the thought. 

�Lark said the one that seems to be the father called himself Hake. This one�s younger. He�s the one that 
came to Lark to tell her. He�s called Handy. He was.., hanging around at Re Albi. And then by ill luck we ran 
into him in Gont Port. But the king sent him off. And now I�m here and he�s there, and all that�s done with.�� 

�But Therru was frightened,� Apple said, a bit grimly. Tenar nodded. 

�But why did you go to Gont Port?� 

�Oh, well, this man Handy was working for a man 

. . . a wizard at the lord�s house in Re Albi, who took a dislike to me She tried to think of the wizard�s 
use-name and could not; all she could think of was Tuaho, a Kargish word for a kind of tree, she could not 
remember what tree. 

�So?�� 

�Well, so, it seemed better just to come on home.�� 

�But what did this wizard dislike you for?�� 

 �For being a woman, mostly.� 

 � Bah,� said Apple. �Old cheese rind.� 

 �Young cheese rind, in this case.� 

 �Worse yet. Well, nobody around here that I know of has seen the parents, if that�s the word for �em. But 
if they�re still hanging about, I don�t like your being alone in the farmhouse.�� 

It is pleasant to be mothered by a daughter, and to behave as a daughter to one�s daughter. Tenar said 
impatiently, �I�ll be perfectly all right!� 

 �You could at least get a dog.� 

 �I�ve thought of that. Somebody in the village might have a pup. We�ll ask Lark when we stop by there.� 

 �Not a puppy, mother. A dog.� 

 �But a young one-one Therru could play with,� she pleaded. 

 �A nice puppy that will come and kiss the burglars,� said Apple, stepping along buxom and grey-eyed, 
laughing at her mother. 


 They came to the village about midday. Lark welcomed Tenar and Therru with a festivity of embraces, 
kisses, questions, and things to eat. Lark�s quiet husband and other villagers stopped by to greet Tenar. She 
felt the happiness of homecoming. 

 Lark and the two youngest of her seven children, a boy and a girl, accompanied them out to the farm. The 
children had known Therru since Lark first brought her home, of course, and were used to her, though two 
months� separation made them shy at first. With them, even with Lark, she remained withdrawn, passive, as 
in the bad old days. 

 �She�s worn out, confused by all this traveling. She�ll get over it. She�s come along wonderfully,� Tenar 
said to Lark, but Apple would not let her get out of it so easily. �One of them turned up and terrified her and 
mother both,�� said Apple. And little by little, between them, the daughter and the friend got the story out of 
Tenar that afternoon, as they opened up the cold, stuffy, dusty house, put it to rights, aired the bedding, 
shook their heads over sprouted onions, laid in a bit of food in the pantry, and set a large kettle of soup on for 
supper. What they got came a word at a time. Tenar could not seem to tell them what the wizard had done; a 
spell, she said vaguely, or maybe it was that he had sent Handy after her. But when she came to talk about 
the king, the words came tumbling out. 

 �And then there he was-the king!-like a sword blade- And Handy shrinking and shrivelling back from 
him- And I thought he was Spark! I did, I really did for a moment, I was so-so beside myself-�� 

 �Well,� said Apple, �that�s all right, because Shinny thought you were his mother. When we were on the 
docks watching you come sailing in in your glory. She kissed him, you know, Aunty Lark. Kissed the 
king-just like that. I thought next thing she�d kiss that mage. But she didn�t.� 

 �I should think not, what an idea. What mage?� said Lark, with her head in a cupboard. 
�Where�s your flour bin, Goha?�� 

 �Your hand�s on it. A Roke mage, come looking for a new archmage.� 

 �Here?� 

 �Why not?�� said Apple. �The last one was from Gont, wasn�t he? But they didn�t spend much time 
looking. They sailed straight back to Havnor, once they�d got rid of mother.� 

 �How you do talk.� 

 �He was looking for a woman, he said,�� Tenar told them. ��A woman on Gont.� But he didn�t seem too 
happy about it.� 

 �A wizard looking for a woman? Well, that�s something new,�� said Lark. �I�d have thought this�d be 
weevilly by now, but it�s perfectly good. I�ll bake up a bannock or two, shall I? Where�s the oil?�� 

 �I�ll need to draw some from the crock in the cool-room. Oh, Shandy! There you are! How are you? 
How�s Clear-brook? How�s everything been? Did you sell the ram lambs?� 

They sat down nine to supper. In the soft yellow light of the evening in the stone-floored kitchen, at the long 
farm table, Therru began to lift her head a little, and spoke a few times to the other children; but there was 
still a cowering in her, and as it grew darker outside she sat so that her seeing eye could watch the window. 

 Not until Lark and her children had gone home in the twilight, and Apple was singing Therru to sleep, 
and she was washing up the dishes with Shandy, did Tenar ask about Ged. Somehow she had not wanted to 
while Lark and Apple were listening; there would have been so many explanations. She had forgotten to 
mention his being at Re Albi at all. And she did not want to talk about Re Albi any more. Her mind seemed 
to darken when she tried to think of it. 

 �Did a man come here last month from me-to help out with the work?� 

 �Oh, I clean forgot!�� cried Shandy. �Hawk, you mean- him with the scars on his face?� 

 �Yes,�� Tenar said. �Hawk.� 


 �Oh, aye, well, he�ll be away up on Hot Springs Mountain, above Lissu, up there with the sheep, with 
Serry�s sheep, I believe. He come here and says how you sent him, and there wasn�t a lick o� work for him 
here, you know, with 

. Clearbrook and me looking after the sheep and I been dairying and old Tiff and Sis helping me out when 
needed, and I racked my brains, but Clearbrook he says, �Go ask Serry�s man, Farmer Serry�s overseer up by 
Kahedanan, do they need herders in the high pastures,� he said, and that Hawk went off and did that, and got 
took on, and was off next day. �Go ask Serry�s man,� Clearbrook told him, and that�s what he done, and got 
took right on. So he�ll be back down with the flocks come fall, no doubt. Up there on the Long Fells above 
Lissu, in the high pastures. I think maybe it was goats they wanted him for. Nice-spoken fellow. Sheep or 
goats, I don�t remember which. I hope it�s all right with you that we didn�t keep him on here, Goha, but it�s 
the truth there wasn�t a lick o� work for him what with me and Clearbrook and old Tiff, and Sis got the flax 
in. And he said he�d been a goatherd over there where he come from, away round the mountain, some place 
above Armouth he said, though he said he�d never herded sheep. Maybe it�ll be goats they�ve got him with 
up there.� 

 �Maybe,� said Tenar. She was much relieved and much disappointed. She had wanted to know him safe 
and well, but she had wanted also to find him here. 

 But it was enough, she told herself, simply to be home- and maybe better that he was not here, that none 
of all that was here, all the griefs and dreams and wizardries and terrors of Re Albi left behind, for good. She 
was here, now, and this was home, these stone floors and walls, these smallpaned windows, outside which 
the oaks stood dark in starlight, these quiet, orderly rooms. She lay awake awhile that night. Her daughter 
slept in the next room, the children�s room, with Therru, and Tenar lay in her own bed, her husband�s bed, 
alone. 

 She slept. She woke, remembering no dream. 

 

After a few days at the farm she scarcely gave a thought to the summer passed on the Overfell. It was 
long ago and far away. Despite Shandy�s insistence on there not being a lick o� work to be done about the 
farm, she found plenty that needed doing: all that had been left undone over the summer and all that had to 
be done in the season of harvest in the fields and dairy. She worked from daybreak till nightfall, and if by 
chance she had an hour to sit down, she spun, or sewed for Therru. The red dress was finished at last, and a 
pretty dress it was, with a white apron for fancy wear and an orangey-brown one for everyday. �Now, then, 
you look beautiful!�� said Tenar in her seamstress�s pride, when Therru first tried it on. 

 Therru turned her face away. 

 �You are beautiful,� Tenar said in a different tone. �Listen to me, Therru. Come here. You have scars, 
ugly scars, because an ugly, evil thing was done to you. People see the scars. But they see you, too, and you 
aren�t the scars. You aren�t ugly. You aren�t evil. You are Therru, and beautiful. You are Therru who can 
work, and walk, and run, and dance, beautifully, in a red dress.� 

 The child listened, the soft, unhurt side of her face as expressionless as the rigid, scar-masked side. 

 She looked down at Tenar�s hands, and presently touched them with her small fingers. �It is a beautiful 
dress,�� she said in her faint, hoarse voice. 

 When Tenar was alone, folding up the scraps of red material, tears came stinging into her eyes. 
She felt rebuked. She had done right to make the dress, and she had spoken the truth to the child. But it 
was not enough, the right and the truth. There was a gap, a void, a gulf, on beyond the right and the truth. 
Love, her love for Therru and Therru�s for her, made a bridge across that gap, a bridge of spider web, but 


love did not fill or close it. Nothing did that. And the child knew it better than she. 

 The day of the equinox came, a bright sun of autumn burning through the mist. The first bronze was in the 
leaves of the oaks. As she scrubbed cream pans in the dairy with the window and door wide open to the 
sweet air, Tenar thought that her young king was being crowned this day in Havnor. The lords and ladies 
would walk in their clothes of blue and green and crimson, but he would wear white, she thought. He would 
climb up the steps to the Tower of the Sword, the steps she and Ged had climbed. The crown of Morred 
would be placed on his head. He would turn as the trumpets sounded and seat himself on the throne that had 
been empty so many years, and look at his kingdom with those dark eyes that knew what pain was, what fear 
was. �Rule well, rule long,� she thought, �poor boy!�� And she thought, �It should have been Ged there 
putting the crown on his head. He should have gone. 

 But Ged was herding the rich man�s sheep, or maybe goats, up in the high pastures. It was a fair, dry, 
golden autumn, and they would not be bringing the flocks down till the snow fell up there on the heights. 

 When she went into the village, Tenar made a point of going by Ivy�s cottage at the end of Mill Lane. 
Getting to know Moss at Re Albi had made her wish to know Ivy better, if she could once get past the 
witch�s suspicion and jealousy. She missed Moss, even though she had Lark here; she had learned from her 
and had come to love her, and Moss had given both her and Therru something they needed. She hoped to 
find a replacement of that here. But Ivy, though a great deal cleaner and more reliable than Moss, had no 
intention of giving up her dislike of Tenar. She treated her overtures of friendship with the contempt that, 
Tenar admitted, they perhaps deserved. �You go your way, I go mine,� the witch told her in everything but 
words; and Tenar obeyed, though she continued to treat Ivy with marked respect when they met. She had, 
she thought, slighted her too often and too long, and owed her reparation. Evidently agreeing, the witch 
accepted her due with unbending ire. 

 In mid-autumn the sorcerer Beech came up the valley, called by a rich farmer to treat his gout. He stayed 
on awhile in the Middle Valley villages as he usually did, and passed one afternoon at Oak Farm, checking 
up on Therru and talking with Tenar. He wanted to know anything she would tell him of Ogion�s last days. 
He was the pupil of a pupil of Ogion�s and a devout admirer of the mage of Gont. Tenar found it was not so 
hard to talk about Ogion as about other people of Re Albi, and told him all she could. When she had done he 
asked a little cautiously, �And the archmage-did he come?� 

 �Yes,� Tenar said. 

 Beech, a smooth-skinned, mild-looking man in his forties, tending a little to fat, with dark half-circles 
under his eyes that belied the blandness of his face, glanced at her, and asked nothing. 

 �He came after Ogion�s death. And left,� she said. And presently, �He�s not archmage now. You knew 
that?� 

 Beech nodded. 

 �Is there any word of their choosing a new archmage?� The sorcerer shook his head. �There was a ship in 
from the Enlades not long ago, but no word from her crew of anything but the coronation. They were full of 
that! And it sounds as if all auspices and events were fortunate. If the goodwill of mages is valuable, then 
this young king of ours is a rich man. . . . And an active one, it seems. There�s an order come overland from 
Gont Port just before I left Valmouth, for the nobles and merchants and the mayor and his council to meet 
together and see to it that the bailiffs of the district be worthy and accountable men, for they�re the king�s 
officers now, and are to do his will and enact his law. Well, you can imagine how Lord Heno greeted that!� 
Heno was a notable patron of pirates, who had long kept most of the bailiffs and sea-sheriffs of South Gont 
in his pocket. �But there were men willing to face up to Heno, with the king standing behind them. 


 They dismissed the old lot then and there, and named fifteen new bailiffs, decent men, paid out of the 
mayor�s funds. Heno stormed off swearing destruction. It�s a new day! Not all at once, of course, but it�s 
coming. I wish Master Ogion had lived to see it.� 

 

�He did,� Tenar said. �As he was dying, he smiled, and he said, �All changed . . . . " 

 Beech took this in his sober way, nodding slowly. �All changed,� he repeated . 

 After a while he said, �The little one�s doing very well.� 

 �Well enough. . . . Sometimes I think not well enough.� 

 �Mistress Goha,� said the sorcerer, �if I or any sorcerer or witch or I daresay wizard had kept her, and 
used all the power of healing of the Art Magic for her all these months since she was injured, she wouldn�t 
be better off. Maybe not as well as she is. You have done all that can be done, mistress. You have done a 
wonder.� 

 She was touched by his earnest praise, and yet it made her sad; and she told him why. �It isn�t enough,� 
she said. �I can�t heal her. She is . . . What is she to do? What will become of her?� She ran off the thread she 
had been spinning onto the spindle-shank, and said, �I am afraid.� 

 �For her,� Beech said, half querying. 

 �Afraid because her fear draws to it, to her, the cause of her fear. Afraid because- � 

But she could not find the words for it. 

 �If she lives in fear, she will do harm,� she said at last. �I�m afraid of that.� 

 The sorcerer pondered. "I�ve thought," � he said at last in his diffident way, that maybe, if she has the gift, 
as I think she does, she might be trained a bit in the Art. And, as a witch, her . . . appearance wouldn�t be so 
much against her-possibly.� He cleared his throat. �There are witches who do very creditable work,� he said. 

 Tenar ran a little of the thread she had spun between her fingers, testing it for evenness and strength. 
�Ogion told me to teach her. �Teach her all,� he said, and then, �Not Roke.� I don�t know what he meant." 

 Beech had no difficulty with it. �He meant that the learning of Roke-the High Arts-wouldn�t be suitable 
for a girl,� he explained. �Let alone one so handicapped. But if he said to teach her all but that lore, it would 
seem that he too saw her way might well be the witches� way.� He pondered again, more cheerfully, having 
got the weight of Ogion�s opinion on his side. �In a year or two, when she�s quite strong, and grown a bit 
more, you might think of asking Ivy to begin teaching her a bit. Not too much, of course, even of that kind of 
thing, till she has her true name. 

Tenar felt a strong, immediate resistance to the suggestion. She said nothing, but Beech was a sensitive man. 
�Ivy�s dour,� he said. �But what she knows, she does honestly. Which can�t be said of all witches. Weak as 
women�s magic, you know, and wicked as women�s magic! But I�ve known witches with real healing power. 
Healing befits a woman. It comes natural to her. And the child might be drawn to that-having been so hurt 
herself.� 

 His kindness was, Tenar thought, innocent. 

 She thanked him, saying that she would think carefully about what he had said. And indeed she did so. 

 


Before the month was out, the villages of Middle Valley had met at the Round Barn of Sodeva to appoint 
their own bailiffs and officers of the peace and to levy a tax upon themselves to pay the bailiffs� wages with. 
Such were the king�s orders, brought to the mayors and elders of the villages, and readily obeyed, for there 
were as many sturdy beggars and thieves on the roads as ever, and the villagers and farmers were eager to 
have order and safety. Some ugly rumors went about, such as that Lord Heno had formed a Council of 
Scoundrels and was enlisting all the blackguards in the countryside to go about in gangs breaking the heads 
of the king�s bailies; but most people said, �Just let �em try! � � and went home telling each other that now an 
honest man could sleep safe abed at night, and what went wrong the king was setting right, though the taxes 
were beyond all reason and they�d all be poor men forever trying to pay them. 

 Tenar was glad to hear of all this from Lark, but did not pay it much heed. She was working very hard; 
and since she had got home she had, almost without being aware of it, resolved not to let the thought of 
Handy or any such ruffian rule her life or Therru�s. She could not keep the child with her every moment, 
renewing her terrors, forever reminding her of what she could not remember and live. The child must be free 
and know herself to be free, to grow in grace. 

 She had gradually lost the shrinking, fearful manner, and by now went all about the farm and the byways 
and even into the village by herself. Tenar said no word of caution to her, even when she had to prevent 
herself from doing so. Therm was safe on the farm, safe in the village, no one was going to hurt her: that 
must be taken as unquestionable. And indeed Tenar did not often question it. With herself and Shandy and 
Clearbrook around the place, and Sis and Tiff down in the lower house, and Lark�s family all over the 
village, in the sweet autumn of the Middle Valley, what harm was going to come to the child? 

 She�d get a dog, too, when she heard of one she wanted, one of the big grey Gontish sheep-guards, with 
their wise, curly heads. 

 Now and then she thought, as she had at Re Albi, �I must be teaching the child! Ogion said so.� But 
somehow nothing seemed to get taught to her but farm work, and stories, in the evening, as the nights drew 
in and they began to sit by the kitchen fire after supper before they went to bed. Maybe Beech was right, and 
Therru should be sent to a witch to learn what witches knew. It was better than apprenticing her to a weaver, 
as Tenar had thought of doing. But not all that much better. And she was still not very big; and was very 
ignorant for her age, for she had been taught nothing before she came to Oak Farm. She had been like a little 
animal, barely knowing human speech, and no human skills. She learned quickly and was twice as obedient 
and diligent as Lark�s unruly girls and laughing, lazy boys. She could clean and serve and spin, cook a little, 
sew a little, look after poultry, fetch the cows, and do excellent work in the dairy. A proper farm-lassie, old 
Tiff called her, fawning a bit. Tenar had also seen him make the sign to avert evil, surreptitiously, when 
Therru passed him. Like most people, Tiff believed that you are what happens to you. The rich and strong 
must have virtue; one to whom evil has been done must be bad, and may rightly be punished. 

 In which case it would not help much if Therru became the properest farm-lassie in Gont. Not even 
prosperity would diminish the visible brand of what had been done to her. So Beech had thought of her 
being a witch, accepting, making use, of the brand. Was that what Ogion had meant, when he said �Not 
Roke� - when he said �They will fear her�? Was that all? 

 One day when a managed chance brought them together in the village street, Tenar said to Ivy, 
�There�s a question I want to ask you, Mistress Ivy. A matter of your profession. � 

 The witch eyed her. She had a scathing eye. 

 �My profession, is it?� 

 Tenar nodded, steady. 


 �Come on, then,� Ivy said with a shrug, leading off down Mill Lane to her little house. 

 It was not a den of infamy and chickens, like Moss�s house, but it was a witch-house, the beams hung 
thick with dried and drying herbs, the fire banked under grey ash with one tiny coal winking like a red eye, 
a lithe, fat, black cat with one white mustache sleeping up on a shelf, and everywhere a profusion of little 
boxes, pots, ewers, trays, and stoppered bottles, all aromatic, pungent or sweet or strange. 

 �What can I do for you, Mistress Goha?� Ivy asked, very dry, when they were inside. 

 �Tell me, if you will, if you think my ward, Therru, has any gift for your art-any power in her.� 

 �She? Of course!� said the witch. 

 Tenar was a bit floored by the prompt and contemptuous answer. �Well,�� she said. �Beech seemed to 
think so.� 

 �A blind bat in a cave could see it,� said Ivy. �Is that all?� 

 �No. I want your advice. When I�ve asked my question, you can tell me the price of the answer. Fair?� 

 �Fair.� 

 �Should I prentice Therru for a witch, when she�s a bit older?�� 

 Ivy was silent for a minute, deciding on her fee, Tenar thought. Instead, she answered the question. �I 
would not take her,� � she said. 

 �Why?� 

 �I�d be afraid to,�� the witch answered, with a sudden fierce stare at Tenar. 

 �Afraid? Of what?� 

 �Of her! What is she?�� 

 �A child. An ill-used child!� 

 �That�s not all she is.� 

 Dark anger came into Tenar and she said, �Must a prentice witch be a virgin, then?� 

 Ivy stared. She said after a moment, �I didn�t mean that.� 

 �What did you mean?�� 

 �I mean I don�t know what she is. I mean when she looks at me with that one eye seeing and one eye blind 
I don�t know what she sees. I see you go about with her like she was any child, and I think, What are they? 
What�s the strength of that woman, for she�s not a fool, to hold a fire by the hand, to spin thread with the 
whirlwind? They say, mistress, that you lived as a child yourself with the Old Ones, the Dark Ones, the Ones 
Underfoot, and that you were queen and servant of those powers. Maybe that�s why you�re not afraid of this 
one. What power she is, I don�t know, I don�t say. But it�s beyond my teaching, I know that-or Beech�s, or 
any witch or wizard I ever knew! I�ll give you my advice, mistress, free and feeless. It�s this: Beware. 
Beware her, the day she finds her strength! That�s all.� 

 �I thank you, Mistress Ivy,� Tenar said with all the formality of the Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, and 
went out of the warm room into the thin, biting wind of the end of autumn. 

 


She was still angry. Nobody would help her, she thought. She knew the job was beyond her, they didn�t have 
to tell her that-but none of them would help her. Ogion had died, and old Moss ranted, and Ivy warned, and 
Beech kept clear, and Ged-the one who might really have helped- Ged ran away. Ran off like a whipped dog, 
and never sent sign or word to her, never gave a thought to her or Therru, but only to his own precious shame. 
That was his child, his nurseling. That was all he cared about. He had never cared or thought about her, only 
about power-her power, his power, how he could use it, how he could make more power of it. Putting the 
broken Ring together, making the Rune, putting a king on the throne. And when his power was gone, still it 
was all he could think about: that it was gone, lost, leaving him only himself, his shame, his emptiness. 

 "You aren�t being fair," Goha said to Tenar. 

 "Fair!" said Tenar. "Did he play fair?" 

 "Yes," said Goha. "He did. Or tried to". 

 "Well, then, he can play fair with the goats he�s herding; it�s nothing to me," said Tenar, trudging 
homeward in the wind and the first, sparse, cold rain. 

 �Snow tonight, maybe,� said her tenant Tiff, meeting her on the road beside the meadows of the Kaheda. 

 �Snow so soon? I hope not.� 

 �Freeze, anyway, for sure.� 

 And it froze when the sun was down: rain puddles and watering troughs skimming over, then opaqued 
with ice; the reeds by the Kaheda stilled, bound in ice; the wind itself stilled as if frozen, unable to move. 

 Beside the fire-a sweeter fire than Ivy�s, for the wood was that of an old apple that had been taken down 
in the orchard last spring-Tenar and Therru sat to spin and talk after supper was cleared away. 

 �Tell the story about the cat ghosts,�� Therru said in her husky voice as she started the wheel to spin a 
mass of dark, silky goat�s-wool into fleecefell yarn. 

 �That�s a summer story." 

 Therru cocked her head. 

 �In winter the stories should be the great stories. In winter you learn the Creation of E`a, so that you can 
sing it at the Long Dance when summer comes. In winter you learn the Winter Carol and the Deed of the 
Young King, and at the Festival of Sunreturn, when the sun turns north to bring the spring, you can sing 
them.� 

 �I can�t sing,� the girl whispered. 

 Tenar was winding spun yarn off the distaff into a ball, her hands deft and rhythmic. 

 �Not only the voice sings,� she said. �The mind sings. The prettiest voice in the world�s no good if the 
mind doesn�t know the songs.� She untied the last bit of yarn, which had been the first spun. �You have 
strength, Therru, and strength that is ignorant is dangerous.� 

 �Like the ones who wouldn�t learn,� Therru said. �The wild ones.� Tenar did not know what she meant, 
and looked her question. �The ones that stayed in the west,� Therru said. 

 �Ah-the dragons-in the song of the Woman of Kemay. Yes. Exactly. So: which will we start with-how the 
islands were raised from the sea, or how King Morred drove back the Black Ships?" � 

 �The islands,� Therru whispered. Tenar had rather hoped she would choose the Deed of the Young King, 
for she saw Lebannen�s face as Morred�s; but the child�s choice was the right one. �Very well,� she 
said. She glanced up at Ogion�s great Lore-books on the mantel, encouraging herself that if she forgot, she 
could find the words there; and drew breath; and began. 

 

By her bedtime Therru knew how Segoy had raised the first of the islands from the depths of Time. Instead 


of singing to her, Tenar sat on the bed after tucking her in, and they recited together, softly, the first stanza of 
the song of the Making. 

 Tenar carried the little oil lamp back to the kitchen, listening to the absolute silence. The frost had bound 
the world, locked it. No star showed. Blackness pressed at the single window of the kitchen. Cold lay on the 
stone floors. 

 She went back to the fire, for she was not sleepy yet. The great words of the song had stirred her spirit, 
and there was still anger and unrest in her from her talk with Ivy. She took the poker to rouse up a little flame 
from the backlog. As she struck the log, there was an echo of the sound in the back of the house. 

 She straightened up and stood listening. 

 Again: a soft, dull thump or thud-outside the house-at the dairy window? 

 The poker still in her hand, Tenar went down the dark hall to the door that gave on the cool-room. Beyond 
the cool-room was the dairy. The house was built against a low hill, and both those rooms ran back into the 
hill like cellars, though on a level with the rest of the house. The cool-room had only air-vents; the dairy had 
a door and a window, low and wide like the kitchen window, in its one outside wall. Standing at the 
cool-room door, she could hear that window being pried or jimmied, and men�s voices whispering. 

 Flint had been a methodical householder. Every door but one of his house had a bar-bolt on each side of 
it, a stout length of cast iron set in slides. All were kept clean and oiled; none were ever locked. 

 She slipped the bolt across the cool-room door. It slid into place without a sound, fitting snug into the 
heavy iron slot on the doorjamb. 

 She heard the outer door of the dairy opened. One of them had finally thought to try it, before they broke 
the window, and found it wasn�t locked. She heard the mutter of voices again. Then silence, long enough 
that she heard her heartbeat drumming in her ears so loud she feared she could not hear any sound over it. 
She felt her legs trembling and trembling, and felt the cold of the floor creep up under her skirt like a hand. 

 �It�s open,� a man�s voice whispered near her, and her heart leapt painfully. She put her hand on the bolt, 
thinking it was open-she had unlocked not locked it- She had almost slid it back when she heard the door 
between the cool-room and the dairy creak, opening. She knew that creak of the upper hinge. She knew the 
voice that had spoken, too, but in a different way of knowing. �It�s a storeroom,� Handy said, and then, as 
the door she stood against rattled against the bolt, �This one�s locked.� It rattled again. A thin blade of light, 
like a knife blade, flicked between the door and the jamb. It touched her breast, and she drew back as if it had 
cut her. 

 The door rattled again, but not much. It was solid, solidly hinged, and the bolt was firm. 

 They muttered together on the other side of the door. She knew they were planning to come around and 
try the front of the house. She found herself at the front door, bolting it, not knowing how she came there. 
Maybe this was a nightmare. She had had this dream, that they were trying to get into the house, that they 
drove thin knives through the cracks of the doors. The doors-was there any other door they could get in? The 
windows-the shutters of the bedroom windows- Her breath came so short she thought she could not get to 
Therru�s room, but she was there, she brought the heavy wooden shutters across the glass. The hinges were 
stiff, and they came together with a bang. Now they knew. Now they were coming. They would come to the 
window of the next room, her room. They would be there before she could close the shutters. And they were. 

 She saw the faces, blurs moving in the darkness outside, as she tried to free the left-hand shutter from its 
hasp. It was stuck. She could not make it move. A hand touched the glass, flattening white against it. 

 �There she is." 

 �Let us in. We won�t hurt you.� 


 �We just want to talk to you." 

 �He just wants to see his little girl.� 

 She got the shutter free and dragged it across the window. But if they broke the glass they would be able 
to push the shutters open from the outside. The fastening was only a hook that would pull out of the wood if 
forced. 

 �Let us in and we won�t hurt you,� one of the voices said. She heard their feet on the frozen ground, 
crackling in the fallen leaves. Was Therru awake? The crash of the shutters closing might have wakened her, 
but she had made no sound. Tenar stood in the doorway between her room and Therru�s, It was pitch-dark, 
silent. She was afraid to touch the child and waken her. She must stay in the room with her. She must fight 
for her. She had had the poker in her hand, where had she put it? She had put it down to close the shutters. 
She could not find it. She groped for it in the blackness of the room that seemed to have no walls. 

 The front door, which led into the kitchen, rattled, shaken in its frame. 

 If she could find the poker she would stay in here, she would fight them. 

 �Here!� one of them called, and she knew what he had found. He was looking up at the kitchen window, 
broad, unshuttered, easy to reach. 

 She went, very slowly it seemed, groping, to the door of the room. It was Therru�s room now. It had been 
her children�s room. The nursery. That was why there was no lock on the inner side of the door. So the 
children could not lock themselves in and be frightened if the bolt stuck. 

 Around back of the hill, through the orchard, Clearbrook and Shandy would be asleep in their cottage. If 
she called, maybe Shandy would hear. If she opened the bedroom window and called-or if she waked Therru 
and they climbed out the window and ran through the orchard-but the men were there, right there, waiting. 

 It was more than she could bear. The frozen terror that had bound her broke, and in rage she ran into the 
kitchen that was all red light in her eyes, grabbed up the long, sharp butcher knife from the block, flung back 
the door-bolt, and stood in the doorway. �Come on, then!" � she said. 

 As she spoke there was a howl and a sucking gasp, and a man yelled, �Look out!� Another shouted, 
�Here! Here!� 

 Then there was silence. 

 Light from the open doorway shot across the black ice of puddles, glittered on the black branches of the 
oaks and on fallen silver leaves, and as her eyes cleared she saw that something was crawling towards her on 
the path, a dark mass or heap crawling towards her, making a high, sobbing wail. Behind the light a black 
shape ran and darted, and long blades shone. 

 �Tenar!� 

 �Stop there,� she said, raising the knife. 

 �Tenar! It�s me-Hawk, Sparrowhawk!� 

 �Stay there,� she said. 

 The darting black shape stood still next to the black mass lying on the path. The light from the doorway 
shone dim on a body, a face, a long-tined pitchfork held upright, like a wizard�s staff, she thought. �Is that 
you?� she said. 

 He was kneeling now by the black thing on the path. 

 �I killed him, I think,� he said. He looked over his shoulder, stood up. There was no sign or sound of the 
other men. 

 �Where are they?� 

 �Ran. Give me a hand, Tenar." 


 She held the knife in one hand. With the other she took hold of the arm of the man that lay huddled up on 
the path. Ged took him under the shoulder and they dragged him up the step and into the house. He lay on the 
stone floor of the kitchen, and blood ran out of his chest and belly like water from a pitcher. His upper lip 
was drawn back from his teeth, and only the whites of his eyes showed. 

 �Lock the door,� Ged said, and she locked the door. 

 �Linens in the press,� she said, and he got a sheet and tore it for bandages, which she bound round and 
round the man�s belly and breast, into which three of the four tines of the pitchfork had driven full force, 
making three ragged springs of blood that dripped and squirted as Ged supported the man�s torso so that she 
could wrap the bandages. 

 �What are you doing here? Did you come with them?� 

 �Yes. But they didn�t know it. That�s about all you can do, Tenar. � He let the man�s body sag down, and 
sat back, breathing hard, wiping his face with the back of his bloody hand. �I think I killed him,� he said 
again. 

 �Maybe you did.� Tenar watched the bright red spots spread slowly on the heavy linen that wrapped the 
man�s thin, hairy chest and belly. She stood up, and swayed, very dizzy. �Get by the fire,� she said. �You 
must be perishing.� 

 She did not know how she had known him in the dark outside. By his voice, maybe. He wore a bulky 
shepherd�s winter coat of cut fleece with the leather side out, and a 

shepherd�s knit watch cap pulled down; his face was lined and weathered, his hair long and iron-grey. He 
smelled like woodsmoke, and frost, and sheep. He was shivering, his whole body shaking. �Get by the fire,� 
she said again. �Put wood on it.� 

 He did so. Tenar filled the kettle and swung it out on its iron arm over the blaze. 

 There was blood on her skirt, and she used an end of linen soaked in cold water to clean it. She gave the 
cloth to Ged to clean the blood off his hands. �What do you mean, she said, �you came with them but they 
didn�t know it?� 

 �I was coming down. From the mountain. On the road from the springs of the Kaheda. � He spoke in a flat 
voice as if out of breath, and his shivering made his speech slur. �Heard men behind me, and I went aside. 
Into the woods. Didn�t feel like talking. I don�t know. Something about them. I was afraid of them.� 

 She nodded impatiently and sat down across the hearth from him, leaning forward to listen, her hands 
clenched tight in her lap. Her damp skirt was cold against her legs. 

 �I heard one of them say �Oak Farm� as they went by. After that I followed them. One of them kept 
talking. About the child.� 

 �What did he say?� 

 He was silent. He said finally, �That he was going to get her back. Punish her, he said. And get back at 
you. For stealing her, he said. He said-� He stopped. 

 �That he�d punish me, too." 

 �They all talked. About, about that.� 

 �That one isn�t Handy.� She nodded toward the man on the floor. �Is it the. . . " . . . � 

 �He said she was his.� Ged looked at the man too, and back at the fire. �He�s dying. We should get help.� 

 


�He won�t die,� Tenar said. �I�ll send for Ivy in the morning. The others are still out there-how many of 
them?� 

 �Two.� 

 �If he dies he dies, if he lives he lives. Neither of us is going out.� She got to her feet, in a spasm of fear. 
�Did you bring in the pitchfork, Ged!" � 

 He pointed to it, the four long tines shining as it leaned against the wall beside the door. 

 She sat down in the hearthseat again, but now she was shaking, trembling from head to foot, as he had 
done. He reached across the hearth to touch her arm. �It�s all right,� he said. 

 �What if they�re still out there?� 

 �They ran.� 

 �They could come back.� 

 �Two against two? And we�ve got the pitchfork.� 

 She lowered her voice to a bare whisper to say, in terror, �The pruning hook and the scythes are in the 
barn lean-to.� 

 He shook his head. �They ran. They saw-him-and you in the door.� 

 �What did you do?� 

 �He came at me. So I came at him.� 

 �I mean, before. On the road.� 

 �They got cold, walking. It started to rain, and they got cold, and started talking about coming here. 
Before that it was only this one, talking about the child and you, about teaching-teaching lessons-� His voice 
dried up. �I�m thirsty,� he said. 

 �So am I. The kettle�s not boiling yet. Go on. 

 He took breath and tried to tell his story coherently. �The other two didn�t listen to him much. Heard it 
all before, maybe. They were in a hurry to get on. To get to Valmouth. As if they were running from 
somebody. Getting away. But it got cold, and he went on about Oak Farm, and the one with the cap said, 
�Well, why not just go there and spend the night with-" � . 

 �With the widow, yes.� 

 Ged put his face in his hands. She waited. 

 He looked into the fire, and went on steadily. �Then I lost them for a while. The road came out level into 
the valley, and I couldn�t follow along the way I�d been doing, in the woods, just behind them. I had to go 
aside, through the fields, keeping out of their sight. I don�t know the country here, only the road. I was afraid 
if I cut across the fields I�d get lost, miss the house. And it was getting dark. I thought I�d missed the house, 
overshot it. I came back to the road, and almost ran into them-at the turn there. They�d seen the old man go 
by. They decided to wait till it was dark and they were sure nobody else was coming. They waited in the 
barn. I stayed outside. Just through the wall from them.� 

 �You must be frozen,� Tenar said dully. 

 �It was cold.� He held his hands to the fire as if the thought of it had chilled him again. �I found the 
pitchfork by the lean-to door. They went around to the back of the house when they came out. I could have 
come to the front door then to warn you, it�s what I should have done, but all I could think of was to take 
them by surprise-I thought it was my only advantage, chance. . . . I thought the house would be locked and 
they�d have to break in. But then I heard them going in, at the back, there. I went in-into the dairy-after them. 
I only just got out, when they came to the locked door.� He gave a kind of laugh. �They went right by me in 
the dark. I could have tripped them. . . . One of them had a flint and steel, he�d burn a little tinder when they 


wanted to see a lock. They came around front. I heard you putting up the shutters; I knew you�d heard them. 
They talked about smashing the window they�d seen you at. Then the one with the cap saw the window-that 
window-� He nodded toward the kitchen window, with its deep, broad inner sill. �He said, �Get me a rock, 
I�ll smash that right open,� and they came to where he was, and they were about to hoist him up to the sill. So 
I let out a yell, and he dropped down, and one of them-this one-came running right at me. 

 �Ah, ah," � gasped the man lying on the floor, as if telling Ged�s tale for him. Ged got up and bent over 
him. 

 �He�s dying, I think.� 

 �No, he�s not,� Tenar said. She could not stop shaking entirely, but it was only an inward tremor now. 
The kettle was singing. She made a pot of tea, and laid her hands on the thick pottery sides of the teapot 
while it steeped. She poured out two cups, then a third, into which she put a little cold water. �It�s too hot to 
drink,� she told Ged, �hold it a minute first. I�ll see if this�ll go into him.� She sat down on the floor by the 
man�s head, lifted it on one arm, put the cup of cooled tea to his mouth, pushed the rim between the bared 
teeth. The warm stuff ran into his mouth; he swallowed. �He won�t die,� she said. �The floor�s like ice. Help 
me move him nearer the fire.� 

Ged started to take the rug from a bench that ran along the wall between the chimney and the hall. �Don�t 
use that, it�s a good piece of weaving,� Tenar said, and she went to the closet and brought out a worn-out felt 
cloak, which she spread out as a bed for the man. They hauled the inert body onto it, lapped it over him. The 
soaked red spots on the bandages had grown no larger. 

Tenar stood up, and stood motionless. 

 �Therru,� she said. 

 Ged looked round, but the child was not there. Tenar went hurriedly out of the room. 

 The children�s room, the child�s room, was perfectly dark and quiet. She felt her way to the bed, and laid 
her hand on the warm curve of the blanket over Therru�s shoulder. 

 �Therru?� 

 The child�s breathing was peaceful. She had not waked. Tenar could feel the heat of her body, like a 
radiance in the cold room. 

 As she went out, Tenar ran her hand across the chest of drawers and touched cold metal: the poker she 
had laid down when she closed the shutters. She brought it back to the kitchen, stepped over the man�s body, 
and hung the poker on its hook on the chimney. She stood looking down at the fire. 

 �I couldn�t do anything,� she said. �What should I have done? Run out-right away-shouted, and run to 
Clear-brook and Shandy. They wouldn�t have had time to hurt Therru.� 

 �They would have been in the house with her, and you outside it, with the old man and woman. Or they 
could have picked her up and gone clear away with her. You did what you could. What you did was right. 
Timed right. The light from the house, and you coming out with the knife, and me there-they could see the 
pitchfork then-and him down. So they ran.� 

 �Those that could,� said Tenar. She turned and stirred the man�s leg a little with the toe of her shoe, as if 
he were an object she was a little curious about, a little repelled by, like a dead viper. �You did the 
right thing,� she said. 

 �I don�t think he even saw it. He ran right onto it, It was like-� He did not say what it was like. He said, 
�Drink your tea,� and poured himself more from the pot keeping warm on the hearthbricks. �It�s good. Sit 
down,� he said, and she did so. 

 �When I was a boy,� he said after a time, �the Kargs raided my village. They had lances-long, with 


feathers tied to the shaft-� 

 She nodded. �Warriors of the God-Brothers,� she said. �I made a . . . a fog-spell. To confuse them. But 
they came on, some of them. I saw one of them run right onto a pitchfork-like him, Only it went clear 
through him. Below the waist.� 

 �You hit a rib,� Tenar said. 

 He nodded. 

 �It was the only mistake you made,� she said. Her teeth were chattering now. She drank her tea. �Ged,� 
she said, �what if they come back?� 

 �They won�t.� 

 �They could set fire to the house.� 

 �This house?� He looked around at the stone walls. 

 �The haybarn-� 

 �They won�t be back,� he said, doggedly. 

 �No.� 

 They held their cups with care, warming their hands on them. 

 �She slept through it.� 

 �It�s well she did.� 

 �But she�ll see him-here-in the morning-� 

 They stared at each other. 

 �If I�d killed him-if he�d die!� Ged said with rage. �I could drag him out and bury him-� 

 �Do it.� 

 

He merely shook his head angrily. 

 �What does it matter, why, why can�t we do it!� Tenar demanded . 

 �I don�t know.� 

 �As soon as it gets light-� 

 �I�ll get him out of the house. Wheelbarrow. The old man can help me.� 

 �He can�t lift anything any more. I�ll help you.� 

 �However I can do it, I�ll cart him off to the village. There�s a healer of some kind there?� 

 �A witch, Ivy.� 

 She felt all at once abysmally, infinitely weary. She could scarcely hold the cup in her hand . 

 �There�s more tea,� she said, thick-tongued. 

 He poured himself another cupful. 

 The fire danced in her eyes. The flames swam, flared up, sank away, brightened again against the sooty 
stone, against the dark sky, against the pale sky, the gulfs of evening, the depths of air and light beyond the 
world. Flames of yellow, orange, orange-red, red tongues of flame, flame-tongues, the words she could not 
speak. 

 �Tenar.� 

 �We call the star Tehanu,� she said. 

 �Tenar, my dear. Come on. Come with me.� 

 They were not at the fire. They were in the dark-in the dark hall. The dark passage. They had been there 
before, leading each other, following each other, in the darkness underneath the earth. 

 �This is the way,� she said. 


 

 

 

 

 

Winter 

She was waking, not wanting to waken. Faint grey shone at the window in thin slits through the shutters. 
Why was the window shuttered? She got up hurriedly and went down the hail to the kitchen. No one sat by 
the fire, no one lay on the floor, There was no sign of anyone, anything. Except the teapot and three cups on 
the counter. 

 Therru got up about sunrise, and they breakfasted as usual; clearing up, the girl asked, �What happened?� 
She lifted a corner of wet linen from the soaking-tub in the pantry. The water in the tub was veined and 
clouded with brownish red. 

 �Oh, my period came on early,� Tenar said, startled at the lie as she spoke it. 

 Therru stood a moment motionless, her nostrils flared and her head still, like an animal getting a scent. 
Then she dropped the sheeting back into the water, and went out to feed the chickens. 

 Tenar felt ill; her bones ached. The weather was still cold, and she stayed indoors as much as she could.. 
She tried to keep Therru in, but when the sun came out with a keen, bright wind, Therru wanted to be out in 
it. 

 �Stay with Shandy in the orchard,� Tenar said. 

 Therru said nothing as she slipped out. 

 The burned and deformed side of her face was made rigid by the destruction of muscles and the thickness 
of the scar-surface, but as the scars got older and as Tenar learned by long usage not to look away from it as 
deformity but to see it as face, it had expressions of its own. When Therru was frightened, the burned and 
darkened side �closed in,� as Tenar thought, drawing together, hardening. When she was excited or intent, 
even the blind eye socket seemed to gaze, and the scars reddened and were hot to touch. Now, as she went 
out, there was a queer look to her, as if her face were not human at all, an animal, some strange 
horny-skinned wild creature with one bright eye, silent, escaping. 

 And Tenar knew that as she had lied to her for the first time, Therru for the first time was going to 
disobey her. The first but not the last time. 

 She sat down at the fireside with a weary sigh, and did nothing at all for a while. 

 A rap at the door: Clearbrook and Ged-no, Hawk she must call him-Hawk standing on the doorstep. Old 
Clear-brook was full of talk and importance, Ged dark and quiet and bulky in his grimy sheepskin coat. 
�Come in,� she said. �Have some tea. What�s the news?� 

 �Tried to get away, down to Valmouth, but the men from Kahedanan, the bailies, come down and �twas 
in Cherry�s outhouse they found �em,� Clearbrook announced, waving his fist. 

 �He escaped?� Horror caught at her. 

 �The other two,� Ged said. �Not him.� 

 �See, they found the body up in the old shambles on Round Hill, all beat to pieces like, up in the old 
shambles there, by Kahedanan, so ten, twelve of �em �pointed their-selves bailies then and there and come 
after them. And there was a search all through the villages last night, and this morning before �twas hardly 
light they found �em hiding out in Cherry�s outhouse. Half-froze they was.� 

 �He�s dead, then?� she asked, bewildered. 


 Ged had shucked off the heavy coat and was now sitting on the cane-bottom chair by the door to undo his 
leather gaiters. �He�s alive,� he said in his quiet voice. �Ivy has him. I took him in this morning on the 
muck-cart. There were people out on the road before daylight, hunting for all three of them. They�d killed a 
woman, up in the hills.� 

 �What woman?� Tenar whispered. 

 Her eyes were on Ged�s. He nodded slightly. Clearbrook wanted the story to be his, and took it up loudly: 
�I talked with some o� them from up there and they told me they�d all four of �em been traipsing and 
camping and vagranting about near Kahedanan, and the woman would come into the village to beg, all beat 
about and burns and bruises all over her. They�d send her in, the men would, see, like that to beg, and then 
she�d go back to �em, and she told people if she went back with nothing they�d beat her more, so they said 
why go back? But if she didn�t they�d come after her, she said, see, and she�d always go with �em. But then 
they finally went too far and beat her to death, and they took and left her body in the old shambles there 
where there�s still some o� the stink left, you know, maybe thinking that was hiding what they done. And 
they came away then, down here, just last night. And why didn�t you shout and call last night, Goha? Hawk 
says they was right here, sneaking about the house, when he come on em. I surely would have heard, or 
Shandy would, her ears might be sharper than mine. Did you tell her yet?� 

 Tenar shook her head. 

 �I�ll just go tell her,� said the old man, delighted to be first with the news, and he clumped off across the 
yard. He turned back halfway. �Never would have picked you as useful with a pitchfork!� he shouted to Ged, 
and slapped his thigh, laughing, and went on. 

 Ged slipped off the heavy gaiters, took off his muddy shoes and set them on the doorstep, and came over 
to the fire in his stocking feet. Trousers and jerkin and shirt of homespun wool: a Gontish goatherd, with a 
canny face, a hawk nose, and clear, dark eyes. 

 �There�ll be people out soon," he said. �To tell you all about it, and hear what happened here again. 
They�ve got the two that ran off shut up now in a wine cellar with no wine in it, and fifteen or twenty men 
guarding them, and twenty or thirty boys trying to get a peek He yawned, shook his shoulders and arms to 
loosen them, and with a glance at Tenar asked permission to sit down at the fire. 

 She gestured to the hearthseat. �You must be worn out, she whispered. 

 �I slept a little, here, last night. Couldn�t stay awake.� He yawned again. He looked up at her, gauging, 
seeing how she was. 

 �It was Therru�s mother,� she said. Her voice would not go above a whisper. 

 He nodded. He sat leaning forward a bit, his arms on his knees, as Flint had used to sit, gazing into the fire. 
They were very alike and entirely unlike, as unlike as a buried stone and a soaring bird. Her heart ached, and 
her bones ached, and her mind was bewildered among foreboding and grief and remembered fear and a 
troubled lightness. 

 �The witch has got our man,� he said. �Tied down in case he feels lively, With the holes in him stuffed 
full of spiderwebs and blood-stanching spells. She says he�ll live to hang.� 

 �To hang.� 

 


�It�s up to the King�s Courts of Law, now that they�re meeting again. Hanged or set to slave-labor.� 

 She shook her head, frowning. 

 �You wouldn�t just let him go, Tenar," � he said gently, watching her. 

 �No.� 

 �They must be punished,� he said, still watching her. 

 �Punished." That�s what he said. Punish the child. She�s bad. She must be punished. Punish me, for 
taking her. For being-� � She struggled to speak. �I don�t want punishment! - It should not have happened. - 
I wish you�d killed him!� 

 �I did my best,� Ged said. 

 After a good while she laughed, rather shakily. �You certainly did.� 

 �Think how easy it would have been,� he said, looking into the coals again, �when I was a wizard. I could 
have set a binding spell on them, up there on the road, before they knew it. I could have marched them right 
down to Valmouth like a flock of sheep. Or last night, here, think of the fireworks I could have set off! 
They�d never have known what hit them.� 

 �They still don�t,� she said. 

 He glanced at her. There was in his eye the faintest, irrepressible gleam of triumph. 

 �No,� he said. �They don�t.� 

 �Useful with a pitchfork,� she murmured. 

 He yawned enormously. 

 �Why don�t you go in and get some sleep? The second room down the hall. Unless you want to entertain 
company. I see Lark and Daisy coming, and some of the children.� She had got up, hearing voices, to look 
out the window. 

 �I�ll do that,� he said, and slipped away. 

 Lark and her husband, Daisy the blacksmith�s wife, and other friends from the village came by all day 
long to tell and be told all, as Ged had said. She found that their company revived her, carried her away from 
the constant presence of last night�s terror, little by little, till she could begin to look back on it as something 
that had happened, not something that was happening, that must always be happening to her. 

 That was also what Therru had to learn to do, she thought, but not with one night: with her life. 

 She said to Lark when the others had gone, �What makes me rage at myself is how stupid I was.� 

 �I did tell you you ought to keep the house locked.� 

 �No-Maybe-That�s just it. � � 

 �I know,� � said Lark. 

 �But I meant, when they were here-I could have run out and fetched Shandy and Clearbrook-maybe I 
could have taken Therru, Or I could have gone to the lean-to and got the pitchfork myself. Or the 
apple-pruner. It�s seven feet long with a blade like a razor; I keep it the way Flint kept it. Why didn�t I do 
that? Why didn�t I do something? Why did I just lock myself in-when it wasn�t any good trying to? If he- If 
Hawk hadn�t been here- All I did was trap myself and Therru. I did finally go to the door with the butcher 
knife, and I shouted at them. I was half crazy. But that wouldn�t have scared them off.� 

 �I don�t know,� Lark said. �It was crazy, but maybe . . . I don�t know. What could you do but lock the 
doors? But it�s like we�re all our lives locking the doors. It�s the house we live in.� 

 They looked around at the stone walls, the stone floors, the stone chimney, the sunny window of the 
kitchen of Oak Farm, Farmer Flint�s house. 

 �That girl, that woman they murdered,� Lark said, looking shrewdly at Tenar. �She was the same one." 


Tenar nodded. 

 �One of them told me she was pregnant. Four, five months along.� 

 They were both silent. 

 �Trapped,� Tenar said. 

 Lark sat back, her hands on the skirt on her heavy thighs, her back straight, her handsome face set. 
�Fear,� she said. �What are we so afraid of? Why do we let �em tell us we�re afraid? What is it they�re afraid 
of? � � She picked up the stocking she had been darning, turned it in her hands, was silent awhile; finally she 
said, �What are they afraid of us for?� 

 Tenar spun and did not answer. 

 Therru came running in, and Lark greeted her: �There�s my honey! Come give me a hug, my honey girl!� 

 Therru hugged her hastily. �Who are the men they caught?� she demanded in her hoarse, toneless voice, 
looking from Lark to Tenar. 

 Tenar stopped her wheel. She spoke slowly. 

 �One was Handy. One was a man called Shag. The one that was hurt is called Hake.� She kept her eyes 
on Therru�s face; she saw the fire, the scar reddening. �The woman they killed was called Senny, I think.� 

 �Senini,� � the child whispered. 

 Tenar nodded. 

 �Did they kil lher dead?� 

 She nodded again. 

 �Tadpole says they were here.� 

 She nodded again. 

 The child looked around the room, as the women had done; but her look was utterly unacceptant, seeing 
no walls. 

 �Will you kill them?� 

 �They may be hanged.� 

 �Dead?� 

 �Yes.� 

 Therru nodded, half indifferently. She went out again, rejoining Lark�s children by the wellhouse. 

 The two women said nothing. They spun and mended, silent, by the fire, in Flint�s house. 

 After a long time Lark said, �What�s become of the fellow, the shepherd, that followed �em here? Hawk, 
you said he�s called?� 

 �He�s asleep in there,� � said Tenar, nodding to the back of the house. 

 �Ah,� said Lark. 

 The wheel purred. �I knew him before last night.� 

 �Ah. Up at Re Albi, did you?� 

 Tenar nodded. The wheel purred. 

 �To follow those three, and take �em on in the dark with a pitchfork, that took a bit of courage, now. Not 
a young man, is he?� 

 �No.� After a while she went on, �He�d been ill, and needed work. So I sent him over the mountain to tell 
Clear-brook to take him on here. But Clearbrook thinks he can still do it all himself, so he sent him up above 
the Springs for the summer herding. He was coming back from that.� 

 �Think you�ll keep him on here, then?" ��If he likes,� said Tenar. 

 


Another group came out to Oak Farm from the village, wanting to hear Goha�s story and tell her their part in 
the great capture of the murderers, and look at the pitchfork and compare its four long tines to the three 
bloody spots on the bandages of the man called Hake, and talk it all over again. Tenar was glad to see the 
evening come, and call Therru in, and shut the door. 

 She raised her hand to latch it. She lowered her hand and forced herself to turn from it, leaving it 
unlocked. 

 �Sparrowhawk�s in your room,� Therru informed her, coming back to the kitchen with eggs from the 
cool-room. 

 �I meant to tell you he was here-I�m sorry. 

 �I know him,� Therru said, washing her face and hands in the pantry. And when Ged came in, 
heavy-eyed and unkempt, she went straight to him and put up her arms. 

 �Therru,� he said, and took her up and held her. She clung to him briefly, then broke free. 

 �I know the beginning part of the Creation," she told him. �Will you sing it to me?� Again glancing at 
Tenar for permission, he sat down in his place at the hearth. 

 �I can only say it.� 

 He nodded and waited, his face rather stern. The child said: 

 

The making from the unmaking, 

The ending from the beginning, 

Who shall know surely? 

What we know is the doorway between them 

that we enter departing. 

Among all beings ever returning, 

the eldest, the Doorkeeper, Segoy.. . . 

 

 The child�s voice was like a metal brush drawn across metal, like dry leaves, like the hiss of fire burning. 
She spoke to the end of the first stanza: 

 

Then from the foam bright E`a broke. 

 

 Ged nodded brief, firm approval. �Good,� he said. 

 �Last night, � Tenar said. �Last night she learned it. It seems a year ago." 

 �I can learn more,� said Therru. 

 �You will," Ged told her. 

 �Now finish cleaning the squash, please,� said Tenar, and the child obeyed. 

 �What shall I do?" � Ged asked. Tenar paused, looking at him. 

 �I need that kettle filled and heated.� 

 He nodded, and took the kettle to the pump. They made and ate their supper and cleared it away. �Say the 
Making again as far as you know it,� Ged said to Therru, at the hearth, �and we�ll go on from there.� 

 She said the second stanza once with him, once with Tenar, once by herself. 

 �Bed,� said Tenar. 

 �You didn�t tell Sparrowhawk about the king.� 

 �You tell him," � Tenar said, amused at this pretext for delay. 


 Therru turned to Ged. Her face, scarred and whole, seeing and blind, was intent, fiery. �The king came in 
a ship. He had a sword. He gave me the bone dolphin. His ship was flying, but I was sick, because Handy 
touched me. But the king touched me there and the mark went away. She showed her round, thin arm. Tenar 
stared. She had forgotten the mark. 

 �Some day I want to fly to where he lives,� Therru told Ged. He nodded. �I will do that,� � she said. �Do 
you know him?� 

 �Yes. I know him. I went on a long journey with him.� 

 �Where?� 

 �To where the sun doesn�t rise and the stars don�t set. And back from that place.� 

 �Did you fly?� 

 He shook his head. �I can only walk,� he said. 

 


The child pondered, and then as if satisfied said, �Good night,� and went off to her room. Tenar followed her; 
but Therru did not want to be sung to sleep. �I can say the Making in the dark,� she said. �Both stanzas.� 

 Tenar came back to the kitchen and sat down again across the hearth from Ged. 

 �How she�s changing!� she said. �I can�t keep up with her. I�m old to be bringing up a child. And she . . . 
She obeys me, but only because she wants to.� 

 �It�s the only justification for obedience,� Ged observed. �But when she does take it into her head to 
disobey me, what can I do? There�s a wildness in her. Sometimes she�s my Therru, sometimes she�s 
something else, out of reach. I asked Ivy if she�d think of training her. Beech suggested it. Ivy said no. �Why 
not?� I said. �I�m afraid of her!� she said. . . . But you�re not afraid of her. Nor she of you. You and Lebannen 
are the only men she�s let touch her. I let that-that Handy-I can�t talk about it. Oh, I�m tired! I don�t 
understand anything 

 Ged laid a knot on the fire to burn small and slow, and they both watched the leap and flutter of the 
flames. 

 �I�d like you to stay here, Ged,� she said. �If you like.� He did not answer at once. She said, �Maybe 
you�re going on to Havnor-� 

 �No, no. I have nowhere to go. I was looking for work.� 

 �Well, there�s plenty to be done here. Clearbrook won�t admit it, but his arthritis has about finished him 
for anything but gardening. I�ve been wanting help ever since I came back. I could have told the old 
blockhead what I thought of him for sending you off up the mountain that way, but it�s no use. He wouldn�t 
listen.� 

 �It was a good thing for me,� Ged said. �It was the time I needed.� 

 �You were herding sheep?� 

 �Goats. Right up at the top of the grazings. A boy they had took sick, and Serry took me on, sent me up 
there the first day. They keep �em up there high and late, so the underwool grows thick. This last month I had 
the mountain pretty much to myself. Serry sent me up that coat and some supplies, and said to keep the herd 
up as high as I could as long as I could. So I did. It was fine, up there.� 

 �Lonely,� she said. 

 He nodded, half smiling. 

 �You always have been alone.� 

 �Yes, I have.� 

 She said nothing. He looked at her. 

 �I�d like to work here,� he said. 

 �That�s settled, then," � she said. After a while she added, �For the winter, anyway." 

 The frost was harder tonight. Their world was perfectly silent except for the whisper of the fire. The 
silence was like a presence between them. She lifted her head and looked at him. 

 �Well,� she said, �which bed shall I sleep in, Ged? The child�s, or yours?� 

 He drew breath. He spoke low. �Mine, if you will.� 

 �I will.� 

 The silence held him. She could see the effort he made to break from it. �If you�ll be patient with me,� he 
said. 

 �I have been patient with you for twenty-five years,� she said. She looked at him and began to laugh. 
�Come-come on, my dear-Better late than never! I�m only an old woman. . . . Nothing is wasted, nothing is 
ever wasted. You taught me that.� She stood up, and he stood; she put out her hands, and he took them. They 


embraced, and their embrace became close. They held each other so fiercely, so dearly, that they stopped 
knowing anything but each other. It did not matter which bed they meant to sleep in. They lay that night on 
the hearthstones, and there she taught Ged the mystery that the wisest man could not teach him. 

 He built up the fire once, and fetched the good weaving off the bench. Tenar made no objection this time. 
Her cloak and his sheepskin coat were their blankets. 

 They woke again at dawn. A faint silvery light lay on the dark, half-leafless branches of the oaks outside 
the window. Tenar stretched out full length to feel his warmth against her. After a while she murmured, �He 
was lying here. Hake. Right under us." . . . 

 Ged made a small noise of protest. 

 �Now you�re a man indeed,� she said. �Stuck another man full of holes, first, and lain with a woman, 
second. That�s the proper order, I suppose. 

 �Hush,� he murmured, turning to her, laying his head on her shoulder. �Don�t.� 

 �I will, Ged. Poor man! There�s no mercy in me, only justice. I wasn�t trained to mercy. Love is the only 
grace I have. Oh, Ged, don�t fear me! You were a man when I first saw you! It�s not a weapon or a woman 
can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.� 

 They lay in warmth and sweet silence. 

 �Tell me something.� 

 He murmured assent sleepily. 

 �How did you happen to hear what they were saying? Hake and Handy and the other one. How did you 
happen to be just there, just then?� 

 He raised himself up on one elbow so he could look at her face. His own face was so open and vulnerable 
in its ease and fulfillment and tenderness that she had to reach up and touch his mouth, there where she had 
kissed it first, months ago, which led to his taking her into his arms again, and the conversation was not 
continued in words. 

 

There were formalities to be got through. The chief of them was to tell Clearbrook and the other tenants of 
Oak Farm that she had replaced �the old master� with a hired hand. She did so promptly and bluntly. They 
could not do anything about it, nor did it entail any threat to them. A widow�s tenure of her husband�s 
property was contingent on there being no male heir or claimant. Flint�s son the seaman was the heir, and 
Flint�s widow was merely holding the farm for him. If she died, it would go to Clearbrook to hold for the 
heir; if Spark never claimed it, it would go to a distant cousin of Flint�s in Kahedanan. The two couples who 
did not own the land but held a life interest in the work and profit of the farming, as was common on Gont, 
could not be dislodged by any man the widow took up with, even if she married him; but she feared they 
might resent her lack of fidelity to Flint, whom they had after all known longer than she had. To her relief 
they made no objections at all. �Hawk� had won their approval with one jab of a pitchfork. Besides, it was 
only good sense in a woman to want a man in the house to protect her. If she took him into her bed, well, the 
appetites of widows were proverbial. And, after all, she was a foreigner. 

 The attitude of the villagers was much the same. A bit of whispering and sniggering, but little more. It 
seemed that being respectable was easier than Moss thought; or perhaps it was that used goods had little 
value. 

 She felt as soiled and diminished by their acceptance as she would have by their disapproval. Only 
Lark freed her from shame, by making no judgments at all, and using no words-man, woman, widow, 
foreigner-in place of what she saw, but simply looking, watching her and Hawk with interest, curiosity, 


envy, and generosity. 

 Because Lark did not see Hawk through the words herdsman, hired hand, widow�s man, but looked at 
him himself, she saw a good deal that puzzled her. His dignity and simplicity were not greater than that of 
other men she had known, but were a little different in quality; there was a size to him, she thought, not 
height or girth, certainly, but soul and mind. She said to Ivy, �That man hasn�t lived among goats all his life. 
He knows more about the world than he does about a farm.� 

 �I�d say he�s a sorcerer who�s been accursed or lost his power some way,� the witch said. �It happens.� 

 �Ah,� said Lark. 

 But the word �archmage� was too great and grand a word to bring from far-off pomps and palaces and fit 
to the dark-eyed, grey-haired man at Oak Farm, and she never did that. If she had, she could not have been as 
comfortable with him as she was. Even the idea of his having been a sorcerer made her a bit uneasy, the 
word getting in the way of the man, until she actually saw him again. He was up in one of the old apple trees 
in the orchard pruning out deadwood, and he called out a greeting to her as she came to the farm. His name 
fit him well, she thought, perched up there, and she waved at him, and smiled as she went on. 

 Tenar had not forgotten the question she had asked him on the hearthstones under the sheepskin coat. She 
asked it again, a few days or months later-time went along very sweet and easy for them in the stone house, 
on the winterbound farm. �You never told me," � she said, �how you came to hear them talking on the road.� 

 �I told you, I think. I�d gone aside, hidden, when I heard 

 �Why?� 

 �I was alone, and knew there were some gangs around.� 

 �Yes, of course- But then just as they passed, Hake was talking about Therru?� 

 �He said �Oak Farm,� I think.� 

 �It�s all perfectly possible. It just seems so convenient.� Knowing she did not disbelieve him, he lay back 
and waited . 

 �It�s the kind of thing that happens to a wizard,� she said. 

 �And others.� 

 �Maybe.� 

 �My dear, you�re not trying to . . . reinstate me?� 

 �No. No, not at all. Would that be a sensible thing to do? If you were a wizard, would you be here?� 

 They were in the big oak-framed bed, well covered with sheepskins and feather-coverlets, for the room 
had no fireplace and the night was one of hard frost on fallen snow. 

 �But what I want to know is this. Is there something besides what you call power-that comes before it, 
maybe? Or something that power is just one way of using? Like this. Ogion said of you once that before 
you�d had any learning or training as a wizard at all, you were a mage. Mage-born, he said. So I imagined 
that, to have power, one must first have room for the power. An emptiness to fill. And the greater the 
emptiness the more power can fill it. But if the power never was got, or was taken away, or was given 
away-still that would be there.� 

 �That emptiness,� he said. 

 �Emptiness is one word for it. Maybe not the right word.� 

 �Potentiality?� he said, and shook his head. �What is able to be . . . to become.� 

 �I think you were there on that road, just there just then, because of that-because that is what happens to 
you. You didn�t make it happen. You didn�t cause it. It wasn�t because of your �power.� It happened to you. 
Because of your emptiness.� 


 After a while he said, �This isn�t far from what I was taught as a boy on Roke: that true magery lies in 
doing only what you must do. But this would go further. Not to do, but to be done to. . . . 

 �I don�t think that�s quite it. It�s more like what true doing rises from. Didn�t you come and save my 
life-didn�t you run a fork into Hake? That was �doing,� all right, doing what you must do. . . ." 

 He pondered again, and finally asked her, �Is this a wisdom taught you when you were Priestess of the 
Tombs?" 

 �No.� She stretched a little, gazing into the darkness. �Arha was taught that to be powerful she must 
sacrifice. Sacrifice herself and others. A bargain: give, and so get. And I cannot say that that�s untrue. But 
my soul can�t live in that narrow place-this for that, tooth for tooth, death for life. . . . There is a freedom 
beyond that. Beyond payment, retribution, redemption-beyond all the bargains and the balances, there is 
freedom.� 

 �The doorway between them," he said softly. 

 That night Tenar dreamed. She dreamed that she saw the doorway of the Creation of E`a, It was a little 
window of gnarled, clouded, heavy glass, set low in the west wall of an old house above the sea. The 
window was locked, It had been bolted shut. She wanted to open it, but there was a word or a key, something 
she had forgotten, a word, a key, a name, without which she could not open it. She sought for it in rooms of 
stone that grew smaller and darker till she found that Ged was holding her, trying to wake her and comfort 
her, saying, �It�s all right, dear love, it will be all right!" � � 

 �I can�t get free!� she cried, clinging to him. 

 He soothed her, stroking her hair; they lay back together, and he whispered, �Look.� 

 The old moon had risen. Its white brilliance on the fallen snow was reflected into the room, for cold as it 
was Tenar would not have the shutters closed. All the air above them was luminous. They lay in 
shadow, but it seemed as if the ceiling were a mere veil between them and endless, silver, tranquil depths of 
light. 

 

It was a winter of heavy snows on Gont, and a long winter. The harvest had been a good one. There was food 
for the animals and people, and not much to do but eat it and stay warm. 

 Therru knew the Creation of E`a all through. She spoke the Winter Carol and the Deed of the Young King 
on the day of Sunreturn. She knew how to handle a piecrust, how to spin on the wheel, and how to make 
soap. She knew the name and use of every plant that showed above the snow, and a good deal of other lore, 
herbal and verbal, that Ged had stowed away in his head from his short apprenticeship with Ogion and his 
long years at the School on Roke. But he had not taken down the Runes or the Lore-books from the 
mantelpiece, nor had he taught the child any word of the Language of the Making. 

 He and Tenar spoke of this. She told him how she had taught Therru the one word, tolk, and then had 
stopped, for it had not seemed right, though she did not know why. 

 �I thought perhaps it was because I�d never truly spoken that language, never used it in magery. I thought 
perhaps she should learn it from a true speaker of it." � � 

 �No man is that.� 

 �No woman is half that.� 

 

�I meant that only the dragons speak it as their native tongue.� 

 �Do they learn it?� 

 Struck by the question, he was slow to answer, evidently calling to mind all he had been told and knew of 


the dragons. �I don�t know,� he said at last. �What do we know about them? Would they teach as we do, 
mother to child, elder to younger? Or are they like the animals, teaching some things, but born knowing 
most of what they know? Even that we don�t know. But my guess would be that the dragon and the speech of 
the dragon are one. One being.� 

 �And they speak no other tongue.� 

 He nodded. �They do not learn," � he said. �They are. 

 Therru came through the kitchen. One of her tasks was to keep the kindling box filled, and she was busy 
at it, bundled up in a cut-down lambskin jacket and cap, trotting back and forth from the woodhouse to the 
kitchen. She dumped her load in the box by the chimney corner and set off again. 

 �What is it she sings?� Ged asked. 

 �Therru?" 

 �When she�s alone.� 

 �But she never sings. She can�t.� 

 �Her way of singing. �Farther west than west.' " . . . 

 �Ah!� said Tenar. �That story! Did Ogion never tell you about the Woman of Kemay?� 

 �No,� he said, �tell me. 

 She told him the tale as she spun, and the purr and hush of the wheel went along with the words of the 
story. At the end of it she said, �When the Master Windkey told me how he�d come looking for �a woman on 
Gont,� I thought of her. But she�d be dead by now, no doubt. And how would a fisherwoman who was a 
dragon be an archmage, anyhow!� 

 �Well, the Patterner didn�t say that a woman on Gont was to be archmage,� � said Ged. He was mending 
a badly torn pair of breeches, sitting up in the window ledge to get what light the dark day afforded. It was a 
half-month after Sunreturn and the coldest time yet. 

 �What did he say, then?� 

 �'A woman on Gont. � So you told me." 

 �But they were asking who was to be the next archmage." 

 �And got no answer to that question.� 

 �Infinite are the arguments of mages," said Tenar rather drily. 

 Ged bit the thread off and rolled the unused length around two fingers. 

 �I learned to quibble a bit, on Roke,� he admitted. �But this isn�t a quibble, I think. �A woman on Gont� 
can�t become archmage. No woman can be archmage. She�d unmake what she became in becoming it. The 
Mages of Roke are men-their power is the power of men, their knowledge is the knowledge of men. Both 
manhood and magery are built on one rock: power belongs to men. If women had power, what would men 
be but women who can�t bear children? And what would women be but men who can?� 

 �Hah!� went Tenar; and presently, with some cunning, she said, �Haven�t there been queens? Weren�t 
they women of power?� 

 �A queen�s only a she-king," � said Ged. 

 She snorted. 

 �I mean, men give her power. They let her use their power. But it isn�t hers, is it? It isn�t because she�s a 
woman that she�s powerful, but despite it." 

 She nodded. She stretched, sitting back from the spinning wheel. �What is a woman�s power, then?� she 
asked. 

 �I don�t think we know.� 


 �When has a woman power because she�s a woman? With her children, I suppose. For a while." . . . � � 

 �In her house, maybe.� 

 She looked around the kitchen. �But the doors are shut,� she said, �the doors are locked.� 

 �Because you�re valuable.� 

 �Oh, yes. We�re precious. So long as we�re powerless. . . . I remember when I first learned that! Kossil 
threatened me-me, the One Priestess of the Tombs. And I realized that I was helpless. I had the honor; but 
she had the power, from the God-king, the man. Oh, it made me angry! And frightened me. . . . Lark and I 
talked about this once. She said, �Why are men afraid of women?� 

 �If your strength is only the other�s weakness, you live in fear,� Ged said. 

 �Yes; but women seem to fear their own strength, to be afraid of themselves.� 

 �Are they ever taught to trust themselves?" � Ged asked, and as he spoke Therru came in on her work 
again. His eyes and Tenar�s met. 

 �No,� she said. �Trust is not what we�re taught.� She watched the child stack the wood in the box. �If 
power were trust,� she said. �I like that word. If it weren�t all these arrangements-one above the other-kings 
and masters and mages and owners- It all seems so unnecessary. Real power, real freedom, would lie in trust, 
not force.� 

 �As children trust their parents,� he said. 

 They were both silent. 

 �As things are,� he said, �even trust corrupts. The men on Roke trust themselves and one another. Their 
power is pure, nothing taints its purity, and so they take that purity for wisdom. They cannot imagine doing 
wrong. 

 She looked up at him. He had never spoken about Roke thus before, from wholly outside it, free of it. 

 �Maybe they need some women there to point that possibility out to them,� she said, and he laughed. 

 She restarted the wheel. �I still don�t see why, if there can be she-kings, there can�t be she-archmages." 

 Therru was listening. 

 �Hot snow, dry water," said Ged, a Gontish saying. �Kings are given power by other men. A mage�s 
power is his own--himself. � � 

 �And it�s a male power. Because we don�t even know what a woman�s power is. All right. I see. But all 
the same, why can�t they find an archmage-a he-archmage?� 

 Ged studied the tattered inseam of the breeches. �Well,� he said, �if the Patterner wasn�t answering their 
question, he was answering one they didn�t ask. Maybe what they have to do is ask it." 

 �Is it a riddle?� Therru asked. 

 �Yes,� said Tenar. �But we don�t know the riddle. We only know the answer to it. The answer is: A 
woman on Gont.� 

 �There�s lots of them,� Therru said after pondering a bit. Apparently satisfied by this, she went out for the 
next load of kindling. 

 Ged watched her go. �All changed," he said. �All . . . Sometimes I think, Tenar - I wonder if Lebannen�s 
kingship is only a beginning. A doorway . . . And he the doorkeeper. Not to pass through.� 

 �He seems so young," � Tenar said, tenderly. 

 �Young as Morred was when he met the Black Ships. Young as I was when I . . . " He stopped, looking 
out the window at the grey, frozen fields through the leafless trees. 

 �Or you, Tenar, in that dark place . . . What�s youth or age? 

 "I don�t know. Sometimes I feel as if I�d been alive for a thousand years; sometimes I feel my life�s been 


like a flying swallow seen through the chink of a wall. I have died and been reborn, both in the dry land and 
here under the sun, more than once. And the Making tells us that we have all returned and return forever to 
the source, and that the source is ceaseless. Only in dying, life. . . . I thought about that when I was up with 
the goats on the mountain, and a day went on forever and yet no time passed before the evening came, and 
morning again. . . . I learned goat wisdom. So I thought, What is this grief of mine for? What man am I 
mourning? Ged the archmage? Why is Hawk the goatherd sick with grief and shame for him? What have I 
done that I should be ashamed?� 

 �Nothing,� Tenar said. �Nothing, ever!� 

 �Oh, yes,� said Ged. �All the greatness of men is founded on shame, made out of it. So Hawk the 
goatherd wept for Ged the archmage. And looked after the goats, also, as well as a boy his age could be 
expected to do. . . " 

 After a while Tenar smiled. She said, a little shyly, �Moss said you were about fifteen." 

 �That would be about right. Ogion named me in the autumn; and the next summer I was off to Roke. . . . 
Who was that boy? An emptiness . . . A freedom.� 

 �Who is Therru, Ged?� 

 He did not answer until she thought he was not going to answer, and then he said, �So made-what 
freedom is there for her?� 

 �We are our freedom, then?� 

 �I think so.� 

 �You seemed, in your power, as free as man can be. But at what cost? What made you free? And I . . . I 
was made, molded like clay, by the will of the women serving the Old Powers, or serving the men who made 
all services and ways and places, I no longer know which. Then I went free, with you, for a moment, and 
with Ogion, But it was not my freedom. Only it gave me choice; and I chose. I chose to mold myself like clay 
to the use of a farm and a farmer and our children. I made myself a vessel, I know its shape. But not the clay. 
Life danced me. I know the dances. But I don�t know who the dancer is.� 

 �And she,� Ged said after a long silence, �if she should ever dance. . ." � 

 �They will fear her,� Tenar whispered. Then the child came back in, and the conversation turned to the 
bread dough raising in the box by the stove. They talked so, quietly and long, passing from one thing to 
another and round and back, for half the brief day, often, spinning and sewing their lives together with words, 
the years and the deeds and the thoughts they had not shared. Then again they would be silent, working and 
thinking and dreaming, and the silent child was with them. 

 So the winter passed, till lambing season was on them, and the work got very heavy for a while as the 
days lengthened and grew bright. Then the swallows came from the isles under the sun, from the South 
Reach, where the star Gobardon shines in the constellation of Ending; but all the swallows� talk with one 
another was about beginning. 

 

 

 

 

 

The Master 

Like the swallows, the ships began to fly among the islands with the return of spring, In the villages there 


was talk, secondhand from Valmouth, of the king�s ships harrying the harriers, driving well-established 
pirates to ruin, confiscating their ships and fortunes. Lord Heno himself sent out his three finest, fastest ships, 
captained by the sorcererseawolf Tally, who was feared by every merchantman from Solea to the Andrades; 
his fleet was to ambush the king�s ships off Oranea and destroy them. But it was one of the king�s ships that 
came into Valmouth Bay with Tally in chains aboard, and under orders to escort Lord Heno to Gont Port to 
be tried for piracy and murder. Heno barricaded himself in his stone manor house in the hills behind 
Valmouth, but neglected to light a fire, it being warm spring weather; so five or six of the king�s young 
soldiers dropped in on him by way of the chimney, and the whole troop walked him chained through the 
streets of Valmouth and carried him off to justice. 

 When he heard this, Ged said with love and pride, �All that a king can do, he will do well.� 

 Handy and Shag had been taken promptly off on the north road to Gont Port, and when his wounds healed 
enough Hake was carried there by ship, to be tried for murder at the king�s courts of law. The news of their 
sentence to the galleys caused much satisfaction and self-congratulation in Middle Valley, to which Tenar, 
and Therru beside her, listened in silence. 

There came other ships bearing other men sent by the king, not all of them popular among the townsfolk 
and villagers of rude Gont: royal sheriffs, sent to report on the system of bailiffs and officers of the peace 
and to hear complaints and grievances from the common people; tax reporters and tax collectors; noble 
visitors to the little lords of Gont, inquiring politely as to their fealty to the Crown in Havnor; and wizardly 
men, who went here and there, seem-ing to do little and say less. 

�I think they�re hunting for a new archmage after all,� said Tenar. 

�Or looking for abuses of the art,� Ged said-� "sorcery gone wrong." 

Tenar was going to say, �Then they should look in the manor house of Re Albi!� but her tongue stumbled 
on the words. What was I going to say? she thought. Did I ever tell Ged about- I�m getting forgetful. What 
was it I was going to tell Ged? Oh, that we�d better mend the lower pasture gate before the cows get out. 

There was always something, a dozen things, in the front of her mind, business of the farm. �Never one 
thing, for you,� Ogion had said. Even with Ged to help her, all her thoughts and days went into the business 
of the farm. He shared the housework with her as Flint had not; but Flint had been a farmer, and Ged was not. 
He learned fast, but there was a lot to learn. They worked. There was little time for talk, now. At the day�s 
end there was supper together, and bed together, and sleep, and wake at dawn and back to work, and so 
round and so round, like the wheel of a water mill, rising full and emptying, the days like the bright water 
falling. 

�Hello, mother,� said the thin fellow at the farmyard gate. She thought it was Lark�s eldest and said, 
�What brings you by, lad?� Then she looked back at him across the clucking chickens and the parading 
geese. 

�Spark!� she cried, and scattered the poultry, running to him. 

�Well, well,� he said. �Don�t carry on." 

He let her embrace him and stroke his face. He came in and sat down in the kitchen, at the table. 

�Have you eaten? Did you see Apple?� 

�I could eat.� 

She rummaged in the well-stocked larder. �What ship are you on? Still the Gull?� 

�No.� A pause. �My ship�s broke up." 

She turned in horror-�Wrecked?� 

�No.� He smiled without humor. �Crew�s broke up. King�s men took her over.� 


�But-it wasn�t a pirate ship-� 

�No.� 

�Then why-?� 

�Said the captain was running some goods they wanted,� he said, unwillingly. He was as thin as ever, 
but looked older, tanned dark, lank-haired, with a long, narrow face like Flint�s but still narrower, harder. 

�Where�s dad?� he said. 

Tenar stood still. 

�You didn�t stop by your sister�s.� 

�No,� he said, indifferent. 

�Flint died three years ago,� she said. �Of a stroke. In the fields-on the path up from the lambing pens. 
Clear-brook found him. It was three years ago. 

There was a silence. He did not know what to say, or had nothing to say. 

She put food before him. He began to eat so hungrily that she set out more at once. 

�When did you eat last?� 

He shrugged, and ate. 

She sat down across the table from him. Late-spring sunshine poured in the low window across the table 
and shone on the brass fender in the hearth. 

He pushed the plate away at last. 

�So who�s been running the farm?� he asked. 

�What�s that to you, son?� she asked him, gently but drily. 

�It�s mine,� he said, in a rather similar tone. 

After a minute Tenar got up and cleared his dishes away. �So it is.� 

�You can stay, o� course,� he said, very awkwardly, perhaps attempting to joke; but he was not a joking 
man. �Old Clearbrook still around?� 

�They�re all still here. And a man called Hawk, and a child I keep. Here. In the house. You�ll have to 
sleep in the loft-room. I�ll put the ladder up.� She faced him again. �Are you here for a stay, then?� 

�I might be.� 

So Flint had answered her questions for twenty years, denying her right to ask them by never answering 
yes or no, maintaining a freedom based on her ignorance; a poor, narrow sort of freedom, she thought. 

�Poor lad,� she said, �your crew broken up, and your father dead, and strangers in your house, all in a 
day. You�ll want some time to get used to it all. I�m sorry, my son. But I�m glad you�re here. I thought of you 
often, on the seas, in the storms, in winter.� 

 


He said nothing. He had nothing to offer, and was unable to accept. He pushed back his chair and was 
about to get up when Therru came in. He stared, half-risen, "What happened to her?� he said. 

�She was burned. Here�s my son I told you about, Therru, the sailor, Spark. Therru�s your sister, Spark.� 

�Sister!� 

�By adoption.� 

�Sister!� he said again, and looked around the kitchen as if for witness, and stared at his mother. 

She stared back. 

He went out, going wide of Therru, who stood motionless. He slammed the door behind him. 

Tenar started to speak to Therru and could not. 

�Don�t cry,� said the child who did not cry, coming to her, touching her arm. �Did he hurt you?� 

�Oh Therru! Let me hold you!� She sat down at the table with Therru on her lap and in her arms, though 
the girl was getting big to be held, and had never learned how to do it easily. But Tenar held her and wept, 
and Therru bent her scarred face down against Tenar�s, till it was wet with tears. 

 

Ged and Spark came in at dusk from opposite ends of the farm. Spark had evidently talked with Clearbrook 
and thought the situation over, and Ged was evidently trying to size it up. Very little was said at supper, and 
that cautiously. Spark made no complaint about not having his own room back, but ran up the ladder to the 
storage-loft like the sailor he was, and was apparently satisfied with the bed his mother had made him there, 
for he did not come back down till late in the morning. 

He wanted breakfast then, and expected it to be served to him. His father had always been waited on by 
mother, wife, daughter. Was he less a man than his father? Was she to prove it to him? She served him his 
meal and cleared it away for him, and went back to the orchard where she and Therru and Shandy were 
burning off a plague of tent caterpillars that threatened to destroy the new-set fruit. 

Spark went off to join Clearbrook and Tiff. And he stayed mostly with them, as the days passed. The 
heavy work requiring muscle and the skilled work with crops and sheep was done by Ged, Shandy, and 
Tenar, while the two old men who had been there all their lives, his father�s men, took him about and told 
him how they managed it all, and truly believed they were managing it all, and shared their belief with him. 

Tenar became miserable in the house. Only outdoors, at the farmwork, did she have relief from the anger, 
the shame that Spark�s presence brought her. 

�My turn,� she said to Ged, bitterly, in the starlit darkness of their room. �My turn to lose what I was 
proudest of.� 

�What have you lost?� 

�My son. The son I did not bring up to be a man. I failed. I failed him.� She bit her lip, gazing dry-eyed 
into the dark. 

Ged did not try to argue with her or persuade her out of her grief. He asked, �Do you think he�ll stay?� 

�Yes. He�s afraid to try and go back to sea. He didn�t tell me the truth, or not all the truth, about his ship. 
He was second mate. I suppose he was involved in carrying stolen goods. Secondhand piracy. I don�t care. 
Gontish sailors are all half-pirate. But he lies about it. He lies. He is jealous of you. A dishonest, envious 
man.� 

�Frightened, I think,� Ged said. �Not wicked. And it is his farm.� 

�Then he can have it! And may it be as generous to him as-� 

�No, dear love,� Ged said, catching her with both voice and hands-�don�t speak-don�t say the evil word!� 
He was so urgent, so passionately earnest, that her anger turned right about into the love that was its source, 


and she cried, �I wouldn�t curse him, or this place! I didn�t mean it! Only it makes me so sorry, so ashamed! 
I am so sorry, Ged!� 

�No, no, no. My dear, I don�t care what the boy thinks of me. But he�s very hard on you." 

�And Therru. He treats her like- He said, he said to me, �What did she do, to look like that?� What did she 
do-!� 

Ged stroked her hair, as he often did, with a light, slow, repeated caress that would make them both sleepy 
with loving pleasure. 

�I could go off goat-herding again,� he said at last. �It would make things easier for you here. Except for 
the work." � 

�I�d rather come with you." 

He stroked her hair, and seemed to be considering. �I suppose we might,� he said. �There were a couple 
of families up there sheep-herding, above Lissu. But then comes the winter... . 

�Maybe some farmer would take us on. I know the work-and sheep-and you know goats-and you�re quick 
at everything-� 

�Useful with pitchforks,� he murmured, and got a little sob of a laugh from her. 

The next morning Spark was up early to breakfast with them, for he was going fishing with old Tiff. He 
got up from the table, saying with a better grace than usual, �I�ll bring a mess of fish for supper. 

Tenar had made resolves overnight. She said, �Wait; you can clear off the table, Spark. Set the dishes in 
the sink and put water on �em. They�ll be washed with the supper things.� 

He stared a moment and said, �That�s women�s work,� putting on his cap. 

�It�s anybody�s work who eats in this kitchen.� 

�Not mine,� he said flatly, and went out. 

She followed him. She stood on the doorstep. �Hawk�s, but not yours?� she demanded. 

He merely nodded, going on across the yard. 

�It�s too late,� she said, turning back to the kitchen. �Failed, failed.� She could feel the lines in her face, 
stiff, beside the mouth, between the eyes. �You can water a stone,� she said, �but it won�t grow.� 

�You have to start when they�re young and tender,� Ged said. �Like me.� 

This time she couldn�t laugh. 

They came back to the house from the day�s work and saw a man talking with Spark at the front gate. 

�That�s the fellow from Re Albi, isn�t it?� said Ged, whose eyes were very good. 

�Come along, Therru,� Tenar said, for the child had stopped short. �What fellow?� She was rather 
nearsighted, and squinted across the yard. �Oh, it�s what�s his name, the sheep-dealer. Townsend. What�s he 
back here for, the carrion crow!� 

Her mood all day had been fierce, and Ged and Therru wisely said nothing. 

She went to the men at the gate. 

�Did you come about the ewe lambs, Townsend? You�re a year late; but there�s some of this year�s yet in 
the fold.� 

�So the master�s been telling me,� said Townsend. 

�Has he,� said Tenar. 

Spark�s face went darker than ever at her tone. 

�I won�t interrupt you and the master, then,� said she, and was turning away when Townsend spoke: �I�ve 
got a message for you, Goha.� 

�Third time�s the charm.� 


�The old witch, you know, old Moss, she�s in a bad way. She said, since I was coming down to Middle 
Valley, she said, �Tell Mistress Goha I�d like to see her before I die, if there�s a chance of her coming." � 

Crow, carrion crow, Tenar thought, looking with hatred at the bearer of bad news. 

�She�s ill?� 

�Sick to death,� Townsend said, with a kind of smirk that might be intended for sympathy. �Took sick in 
the winter, and she�s failing fast, and so she said to tell you she wants bad to see you, before she dies.� 

�Thank you for bringing the message,� Tenar said soberly, and turned to go to the house. Townsend went 
on with Spark to the sheepfolds. 

As they prepared dinner, Tenar said to Ged and Therru, �I must go." 

�Of course,� Ged said. �The three of us, if you like.� 

�Would you?� For the first time that day her face lightened, the storm cloud lifted. �Oh,� she said, 
�that�s-that�s good-I didn�t want to ask, I thought maybe- Therru, would you like to go back to the little 
house, Ogion�s house, for a while?� 

Therru stood still to think. �I could see my peach tree,� she said. 

�Yes, and Heather-and Sippy-and Moss-poor Moss! Oh, I have longed, I have longed to go back up there, 
but it didn�t seem right, There was the farm to run-and all-� 

It seemed to her that there was some other reason she had not gone back, had not let herself think of going 
back, had not even known till now that she yearned to go; but whatever the reason was it slipped away like a 
shadow, a word forgotten. �Has anyone looked after Moss, I wonder, did anyone send for a healer. She�s the 
only healer on the Oveffell, but there�s people down in Gont Port who could help her, surely. Oh, poor Moss! 
I want to go- It�s too late, but tomorrow, tomorrow early. And the master can make his own breakfast!� 

�He�ll learn,� said Ged. 

�No, he won�t. He�ll find some fool woman to do it for him. Ah!� She looked around the kitchen, her face 
bright and fierce. �I hate to leave her the twenty years I�ve scoured that table. I hope she appreciates it!� 

Spark brought Townsend in for supper, but the sheep-dealer would not stay the night, though he was of 
course offered a bed in common hospitality. It would have been one of their beds, and Tenar did not like the 
thought. She was glad to see him go off to his hosts in the village in the blue twilight of the spring evening. 

�We�ll be off to Re Albi first thing tomorrow, son,� she said to Spark. �Hawk and Therru and I.� 

He looked a little frightened. 

�Just go off like that?� 

�So you went; so you came,� said his mother. �Now look here, Spark: this is your father�s money-box. 
There�s seven ivory pieces in it, and those credit counters from old Bridgeman, but he�ll never pay, he hasn�t 
got anything to pay with. These four Andradean pieces Flint got from selling sheepskins to the ship�s 
outfitter in Valmouth four years running, back when you were a boy. These three Haynorian ones are what 
Tholy paid us for the High Creek farm. I had your father buy that farm, and I helped him clear it and sell it. 
I�ll take those three pieces, for I�ve earned them. The rest, and the farm, is yours. You�re the master.� 

 

The tall, thin young man stood there with his gaze on the money-box. 

�Take it all. I don�t want it,� he said in a low voice. 

�I don�t need it. But I thank you, my son. Keep the four pieces. When you marry, call them my gift to your 
wife.� 

She put the box away in the place behind the big plate on the top shelf of the dresser, where Flint had 
always kept it. �Therru, get your things ready now, because we�ll go very early.� 


�When are you coming back?� Spark asked, and the tone of his voice made Tenar think of the restless, 
frail child he had been. But she said only, �I don�t know, my dear. If you need me, I�ll come. 

She busied herself getting out their travel shoes and packs. �Spark,� she said, �you can do something for 
me.� 

He had sat down in the hearthseat, looking uncertain and morose. �What?� 

�Go down to Valmouth, soon, and see your sister. And tell her that I�ve gone back to the Overfell. Tell her, 
if she wants me, just send word.� 

He nodded. He watched Ged, who had already packed his few belongings with the neatness and dispatch 
of one who had traveled much, and was now putting up the dishes to leave the kitchen in good order. That 
done, he sat down opposite Spark to run a new cord through the eyelets of his pack to close it at the top. 

�There�s a knot they use for that,� Spark said. �Sailor�s knot.� 

Ged silently handed the pack across the hearth, and watched as Spark silently demonstrated the knot. 

�Slips up, see,� he said, and Ged nodded. 

 

They left the farm in the dark and cold of the morning. Sunlight comes late to the western side of Gont 
Mountain, and only walking kept them warm till at last the sun got round the great mass of the south peak 
and shone on their backs. 

Therru was twice the walker she had been the summer before, but it was still a two days� journey for them. 
Along in the afternoon, Tenar asked, �Shall we try to get on to Oak Springs today? There�s a sort of inn. We 
had a cup of milk there, remember, Therru?� 

Ged was looking up the mountainside with a faraway expression. �There�s a place I know 

�Fine,� said Tenar. 

A little before they came to the high corner of the road from which Gont Port could first be seen, Ged 
turned aside from the road into the forest that covered the steep slopes above it. The westering sun sent 
slanting red-gold rays into the darkness between the trunks and under the branches. They climbed half a 
mile or so, on no path Tenar could see, and came out on a little step or shelf of the mountainside, a meadow 
sheltered from the wind by the cliffs behind it and the trees about it. From there one could see the heights 
of�the mountain to the north, and between the tops of great firs there was one clear view of the western sea. 
It was entirely silent there except when the wind breathed in the firs. One mountain lark sang long and sweet, 
away up in the sunlight, before dropping to her nest in the untrodden grass. 

The three of them ate their bread and cheese. They watched darkness rise up the mountain from the sea. 
They made their bed of cloaks and slept, Therru next to Tenar next to Ged, In the deep night Tenar woke. An 
owl was calling nearby, a sweet repeated note like a bell, and far off up the mountain its mate replied like the 
ghost of a bell. Tenar thought, �I�ll watch the stars set in the sea,� but she fell asleep again at once in peace 
of heart. 

 

She woke in the grey morning to see Ged sitting up beside her, his cloak pulled round his shoulders, 
looking out through the gap westward. His dark face was quite still, full of silence, as she had seen it once 
long ago on the beach of Atuan. His eyes were not downcast, as then; he looked into the illimitable west. 
Looking with him she saw the day coming, the glory of rose and gold reflected clear across the sky. 

He turned to her, and she said to him, �I have loved you since I first saw you." 

�Life-giver,� he said and leaned forward, kissing her breast and mouth. She held him a moment. They got 
up, and waked Therru, and went on their way; but as they entered the trees Tenar looked back once at the 


little meadow as if charging it to keep faith with her happiness there. 

The first day of the journey their goal had been journeying. This day they would come to Re Albi. So 
Tenar�s mind was much on Aunty Moss, wondering what had befallen her and whether she was indeed 
dying. But as the day and the way went on her mind would not hold to the thought of Moss, or any thought. 
She was tired. She did not like walking this way again to death. They passed Oak Springs, and went down 
into the gorge, and started up again. By the last long uphill stretch to the Overfell, her legs were hard to lift, 
and her mind was stupid and confused, fastening upon one word or image until it became meaningless-the 
dish-cupboard in Ogion�s house, or the words bone dolphin, which came into her head from seeing Therru�s 
grass bag of toys, and repeated themselves endlessly. 

Ged strode along at his easy traveler�s gait, and Therru trudged right beside him, the same Therru who 
had worn out on this long climb less than a year ago, and had to be 

carried . But that had been after a longer day of walking. And the child had still been recovering from her 
punishment. 

She was getting old, too old to walk so far so fast. It was so hard going uphill. An old woman should stay 
home by her fireside. The bone dolphin, the bone dolphin. Bone, bound, the binding spell. The bone man 
and the bone animal. There they went ahead. They were waiting for her. She was slow. She was tired. She 
toiled on up the last stretch of the hill and came up to them where the road came out on the level of the 
Overfell. To the left were the roofs of Re Albi slanting down towards the cliff�s edge. To the right the road 
went up to the manor house. �This way,� Tenar said. 

�No,� the child said, pointing left, to the village. 

�This way,� Tenar repeated, and set off on the right-hand way. Ged came with her. 

They walked between the walnut orchards and the fields of grass. It was a warm late afternoon of early 
summer. Birds sang in the orchard trees near and far. He came walking down the road from the great house 
towards them, the one whose name she could not remember. 

�Welcome!� he said, and stopped, smiling at them. 

They stopped. 

�What great personages have come to honor the house of the Lord of Re Albi,� he said. Tuaho, that was 
not his name. The bone dolphin, the bone animal, the bone child. 

�My Lord Archmage!� He bowed low, and Ged bowed to him. 

�And my Lady Tenar of Atuan!� He bowed even lower to her, and she got down on her knees in the road. 
Her head sank down, till she put her hands in the dirt and crouched until her mouth too was on the dirt of the 
road. 

 

�Now crawl,� he said, and she began to crawl towards him. 

�Stop,� he said, and she stopped. 

�Can you talk?� he asked. She said nothing, having no words that would come to her mouth, but Ged 
replied in his usual quiet voice, �Yes.� 

�Where�s the monster?� 

�I don�t know.� 

�I thought the witch would bring her familiar with her. But she brought you instead. The Lord Archmage 
Sparrow-hawk. What a splendid substitute! All I can do to witches and monsters is cleanse the world of 
them. But to you, who used at one time to be a man, I can talk; you are capable of rational speech, at least. 
And capable of understanding punishment. You thought you were safe, I suppose, with your king on the 


throne, and my master, our master, destroyed. You thought you�d had your will, and destroyed the promise 
of eternal life, didn�t you?� 

�No,� said Ged�s voice. 

She could not see them. She could see only the dirt of the road, and taste it in her mouth. She heard Ged 
speak. He said, �In dying is life.� 

�Quack, quack, quote the Songs, Master of Roke- schoolmaster! What a funny sight to see, the great 
archmage all got up like a goatherd, and not an ounce of magic in him-not a word of power. Can you say a 
spell, archmage? Just a little spell-just a tiny charm of illusion? No? Not a word? My master defeated you. 
Now do you know it? You did not conquer him. His power lives! I might keep you alive here awhile, to see 
that power-my power. To see the old man I keep from death-and I might use your life for that if I need it-and 
to see your meddling king make a fool of himself, with his mincing lords and stupid wizards, look- 

ing for a woman! A woman to rule us! But the rule is here, the mastery is here, here, in this house. All this 
year I�ve been gathering others to me, men who know the true power. From Roke, some of them, from right 
under the noses of the schoolmasters. And from Havnor, from under the nose of that so-called Son of 
Morred, who wants a woman to rule him, your king who thinks he�s so safe he can go by his true name. Do 
you know my name, archmage? Do you remember me, four years ago, when you were the great Master of 
Masters and I was a lowly student at Roke?� 

�You were called Aspen,� said the patient voice. 

�And my true name?� 

�I don�t know your true name." 

�What? You don�t know it? Can�t you find it? Don�t mages know all names?� 

�I�m not a mage." 

�Oh, say it again.� 

�I�m not a mage." 

�I like to hear you say it. Say it again.� 

�I�m not a mage." 

�But I am!� 

�Yes.� 

�Say it!� 

�You are a mage." 

�Ah! This is better than I hoped! I fished for the eel and caught the whale! Come on, then, come meet my 
friends. You can walk. She can crawl.� 

So they went up the road to the manor house of the Lord of Re Albi and went in, Tenar on hands and 
knees on the road, and on the marble steps up to the door, and on the marble pavements of the halls and 
rooms. 

Inside the house it was dark. With the darkness came a darkness into Tenar�s mind, so that she understood 
less and less of what was said. Only some words and voices came to her clearly. What Ged said she 
understood, and when he spoke she thought of his name, and clung to it in her mind. But he spoke very 
seldom, and only to answer the one whose name was not Tuaho. That one spoke to her now and then, calling 
her Bitch. �This is my new pet,� he said to other men, several of them that were there in the darkness where 
candles made shadows. �See how well trained she is? Roll over, Bitch!� She rolled over, and the men 
laughed. 

�She had a whelp,� he said, �that I planned to finish punishing, since it was left half-burned. But she 


brought me a bird she�d caught instead, a sparrowhawk. Tomorrow we�ll teach it to fly.� 

Other voices said words, but she did not understand words any more. 

Something was fastened around her neck and she was made to crawl up more stairs and into a room that 
smelled of urine and rotting meat and sweet flowers. Voices spoke. A cold hand like a stone struck her head 
feebly while something laughed, �Eh, eh, eh,� like an old door creaking back and forth. Then she was kicked 
and made to crawl down halls. She could not crawl fast enough, and was kicked in the breasts and in the 
mouth. Then there was a door that crashed, and silence, and the dark. She heard somebody crying and 
thought it was the child, her child. She wanted the child not to cry. At last it stopped. 

 

 

 

 

 

Tehanu 

The child turned left and went some way before she looked back, letting the blossoming hedgerow hide her. 

The one called Aspen, whose name was Erisen, and whom she saw as a forked and writhing darkness, had 
bound her mother and father, with a thong through her tongue and a thong through his heart, and was leading 
them up toward the place where he hid . The smell of the place was sickening to her, but she followed a little 
way to see what he did. He led them in and shut the door behind them. It was a stone door. She could not 
enter there. 

She needed to fly, but she could not fly; she was not one of the winged ones. 

She ran as fast as she could across the fields, past Aunty Moss�s house, past Ogion�s house and the goats� 
house, onto the path along the cliff and to the edge of the cliff, where she was not to go because she could see 
it only with one eye. She was careful. She looked carefully with that eye. She stood on the edge. The water 
was far below, and the sun was setting far away. She looked into the west with the other eye, and called with 
the other voice the name she had heard in her mother�s dream. 

She did not wait for an answer, but turned round again and went back-first past Ogion�s house to see if her 
peach tree had grown. The old tree stood bearing many small, green peaches, but there was no sign of the 
seedling. The goats had eaten it. Or it had died because she had not watered it. She stood a little while 
looking at the ground there, then drew a long breath and went on back across the fields to Aunty Moss�s 
house. 

Chickens going to roost squawked and fluttered, protesting her entrance. The little hut was dark and very 
full of smells. �Aunty Moss?� she said, in the voice she had for these people. 

�Who�s there?� 

The old woman was in her bed, hiding. She was frightened, and tried to make stone around her to keep 
everyone away, but it didn�t work; she was not strong enough. 

�Who is it? Who�s there? Oh dearie - oh dearie child, my little burned one, my pretty, what are you doing 
here? Where�s she, where�s she, your mother, oh, is she here? Did she come? Don�t come in, don�t come in, 
dearie, there�s a curse on me, he cursed the old woman, don�t come near me! Don�t come near!� 

She wept. The child put out her hand and touched her. �You�re cold,� she said. 

�You�re like fire, child, your hand burns me. Oh, don�t look at me! He made my flesh rot, and shrivel, and 
rot again, but he won�t let me die-he said I�d bring you here. I tried to die, I tried, but he held me, he held me 


living against my will, he won�t let me die, oh, let me die!� 

�You shouldn�t die,� the child said, frowning. 

�Child,� the old woman whispered, �dearie - call me by my name. 

�Hatha,� the child said. 

�Ah. I knew. . . . Set me free, dearie!� 

�I have to wait,� the child said. �Till they come. 

The witch lay easier, breathing without pain. �Till who come, dearie?� she whispered. 

�My people.� 

The witch�s big, cold hand lay like a bundle of sticks in hers. She held it firmly, It was as dark now 
outside the hut as inside it. Hatha, who was called Moss, slept; and presently the child, sitting on the floor 
beside her cot, with a hen perched nearby, slept also. 

 

Men came when the light came. He said, �Up, Bitch! Up!� She got to her hands and knees. He laughed, 
saying, �All the way up! You�re a clever bitch, you can walk on your hind legs, can�t you? That�s it. Pretend 
to be human! We have a way to go now. Come!� The strap was still around her neck, and he jerked it. She 
followed him. 

�Here, you lead her,� he said, and now it was that one, the one she loved, but she did not know his name 
any more, who held the strap. 

They all came out of the dark place. Stone yawned to let them pass and ground together behind them. 

He was always close beside her and the one who held the strap. Others came behind, three or four men. 

The fields were grey with dew. The mountain was dark against a pale sky. Binds were beginning to sing 
in the orchards and hedgerows, louder and louder. 

They came to the edge of the wonld and walked along it for a while until they came to where the ground 
was only rock and the edge was very narrow, There was a line in the rock, and she looked at that. 

�He can push her,� he said. �And then the hawk can fly, all by himself.� 

He unfastened the strap from around her neck. 

�Go stand at the edge,� he said. She followed the mark in the stone out to the edge. The sea was below her, 
nothing else. The air was out beyond her. 

�Now, Sparrowhawk will give her a push,� he said. �But first, maybe she wants to say something. She has 
so much to say. Women always do. Isn�t there anything you�d like to say to us, Lady Tenar?� 

She could not speak, but she pointed to the sky above the sea. 

�Albatross,� he said. 

She laughed aloud. 

In the gulfs of light, from the doorway of the sky, the dragon flew, fire trailing behind the coiling, mailed 
body. Tenar spoke then. 

�Kalessin!� she cried, and then turned, seizing Ged�s arm, pulling him down to the rock, as the roar of fire 
went over them, the rattle of mail and the hiss of wind in upraised wings, the clash of the talons like 
scytheblades on the rock. 

 

The wind blew from the sea. A tiny thistle growing in a cleft in the rock near her hand nodded and nodded in 
the wind from the sea. 

Ged was beside her. They were crouched side by side, the sea behind them and the dragon before them. 

It looked at them sidelong from one long, yellow eye. Ged spoke in a hoarse, shaking voice, in the 


dragon�s language. Tenar understood the words, which were only, �Our thanks, Eldest.� 

Looking at Tenar, Kalessin spoke, in the huge voice like a broom of metal dragged across a gong: �Aro 
Tebanu?� 

�The child,� Tenar said - �Therru!� She got to her feet to run, to seek her child. She saw her coming along 
the ledge of rock between the mountain and the sea, toward the dragon. 

�Don�t run, Therru!� she cried, but the child had seen 

her and was running, running straight to her. They clung to each other. 

The dragon turned its enormous, rust-dark head to watch them with both eyes. The nostril pits, big as 
kettles, were bright with fire, and wisps of smoke curled from them. The heat of the dragon�s body beat 
through the cold sea wind. 

�Tehanu,� the dragon said. 

The child turned to look at it. 

�Kalessin,� she said. 

Then Ged, who had remained kneeling, stood up, though shakily, catching Tenar�s arm to steady himself. 
He laughed. �Now I know who called thee, Eldest!� he said. 

�I did,� the child said. �I did not know what else to do, Segoy. � 

She still looked at the dragon, and she spoke in the language of the dragons, the words of the Making. 

�It was well, child,� the dragon said. �I have sought thee long.� 

�Shall we go there now?� the child asked. �Where the others are, on the other wind?� 

�Would you leave these?� 

�No,� said the child. �Can they not come?� 

�They cannot come. Their life is here.� 

�I will stay with them,� she said, with a little catch of breath. 

Kalessin turned aside to give that immense furnace-blast of laughter or contempt or delight or anger 
- �Hah!� Then, looking again at the child, �It is well. Thou hast work to do here.� 

�I know,� the child said. 

�I will come back for thee,� Kalessin said, �in time.� And, to Ged and Tenar, �I give you my child, as you 
will give me yours. 

�In time,� Tenar said. 

 


Kalessin�s great head bowed very slightly, and the long, sword-toothed mouth curled up at the corner. 

Ged and Tenar drew aside with Therru as the dragon turned, dragging its armor across the ledge, placing 
its taloned feet carefully, gathering its black haunches like a cat, till it sprang aloft. The vaned wings shot up 
crimson in the new light, the spurred tail rang hissing on the rock, and it flew, it was gone-a gull, a swallow, 
a thought. 

Where it had been lay scorched rags of cloth and leather, and other things. 

�Come away,� Ged said. 

But the woman and the child stood and looked at those things. 

�They are bone people,� Therru said. She turned away then and set off. She went ahead of the man and 
woman along the narrow path. 

�Her native tongue,� Ged said. �Her mother tongue.� 

�Tehanu,� said Tenar. �Her name is Tehanu.� 

�She has been given it by the giver of names. 

�She has been Tehanu since the beginning. Always, she has been Tehanu. � 

�Come on!� the child said, looking back at them. �Aunty Moss is sick.� 

 

They were able to move Moss out into the light and air, to wash her sores, and to burn the foul linens of her 
bed, while Therru brought clean bedding from Ogion�s house. She also brought Heather the goatgirl back 
with her. With Heather�s help they got the old woman comfortable in her bed, with her chickens; and 
Heather promised to come back with something for them to eat. 

�Someone must go down to Gont Port,� Ged said, �for the wizard there. To look after Moss; she can be 
healed. 

 And to go to the manor house. The old man will die now. The grandson might live, if the house is made 
clean He had sat down on the doorstep of Moss�s house. He leaned his head back against the doorjamb, in 
the sunlight, and closed his eyes. �Why do we do what we do?� he said. 

Tenar was washing her face and hands and arms in a basin of clear water she had drawn from the pump. 
She looked round when she was done. Utterly spent, Ged had fallen asleep, his face a little upturned to the 
morning light. She sat down beside him on the doorstep and laid her head against his shoulder. Are we 
spared? she thought. How is it we are spared? 

She looked down at Ged�s hand, relaxed and open on the earthen step. She thought of the thistle that 
nodded in the wind, and of the taloned foot of the dragon with its scales of red and gold. She was half-asleep 
when the child sat down beside her. 

�Tehanu,� she murmured. 

�The little tree died,� the child said. 

After a while Tenar�s weary, sleepy mind understood, and woke up enough to make a reply. �Are there 
peaches on the old tree?� 

They spoke low, not to waken the sleeping man. �Only little green ones." 

�They�ll ripen, after the Long Dance. Soon now. �Can we plant one?� 

�More than one, if you like. Is the house all right?� 

�It�s empty." 

�Shall we live there?� She roused a little more, and put her arm around the child. �I have money,� she said, 
�enough to buy a herd of goats, and Turby�s winter-pasture, if it�s still for sale. Ged knows where to take 
them up the mountain, summers. . . . I wonder if the wool we combed is still there?� So saying, she thought, 


We left the books, Ogion�s books! On the mantel at Oak Farm-for Spark, poor boy, he can�t read a word of 
them! 

 But it did not seem to matter. There were new things to be learned, no doubt. And she could send 
somebody for the books, if Ged wanted them. And for her spinning wheel. Or she could go down herself, 
come autumn, and see her son, and visit with Lark, and stay a while with Apple. They would have to replant 
Ogion�s garden right away if they wanted any vegetables of their own this summer. She thought of the rows 
of beans and the scent of the bean flowers. She thought of the small window that looked west. �I think we 
can live there,� she said. 

 


PRAISE FOR URSULA K. LE GUIN AND BUFFALO GALS AND OTHER ANIMAL PRESENCES 
"Ursula Le Guin, one of the most significant science fiction writers of the past two decades, charms the 
reader with some glimpses of greatness . . . this disarmingly informal volume of short fiction ... is like a 
visit with one of America's most brilliant writers." 
�Santa Barbara News-Press 
"Refreshing . . . these stories are a strong tonic for many modern 
spiritual ills." 
�Santa Cruz Sentinel 
"A delightful collection . . . designed to shatter your world view." 
�Riverside Press Enterprise 
"How wonderful to be in the hands of an accomplished storyteller like Ursula K. Le Guin, whose work 
shares in that imaginative transformation of the world sometimes called magical realism, science fiction, 
or fantasy." 
�Los Angeles Times Book Review 
"Ursula Le Guin . . . transcends genre and delivers a delightful collection of works. . . . The effect is a 
disturbing and delicious disorientation that makes us resee ourselves and our relationship to the world. 
What she does with craft and good humor will both 
entertain and educate." 
�Santa Barbara 
URSULA K. LE GUIN is an outstanding American writer whose works include science fiction, fantasy, 
young adult fiction, children's books, essays and poems. She has received numerous awards including 
the Nebula, Hugo, Kafka, and National Book Awards. Among her best known novels are The Left Hand 
of Darkness, The Dispossessed, Earthsea (a Trilogy), and Always Coming Home. 
NAL BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE 
PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING 
DIVISION. NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY, 1633 BROADWAY, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10019. 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

"Come Into Animal Presences" Denise Leyertoy, Poems 1960-1967, � 1961 by Denise Levertov 
Goodman; reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Excerpt from "Original 
Sin" � 1948 by Robinson Jeffers; reprinted from Selected Poems by permission of Random House, Inc. 
"Elegy" by Rainer Maria Rilke is the translation of Ursula K. Le Guin. "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come 
Out Tonight" � 1987 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science 
Fiction Nov. 1987. "The Basalt" � 1982 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Open Places 33 Spring 
1982. "Mount St. Helens/Omphalos" � 1975 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Wild Angels by 
Ursula K. Le Guin, Capra Press, 1975. "The Wife's Story" � 1982 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared 
in Compass Rose by Ursula K. Le Guin, Harper & Row, 1982. "Mazes" � 1975 by Ursula K. Le Guin; 
first appeared in Epoch, edited by Robert Silverberg and Roger Elwood. "Torrey Pines Reserve" � 1981 
by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Hard Words by Ursula K. Le Guin, Harper & Row, 1981. 
"Lewis and Clark and After" � 1987 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Seattle Review, 
Summer 1987. "Xmas Over" � 1984 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Clinton Street Quarterly, 
1984. "The Direction of the Road" � 1974 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Orbit 14, edited by 
Damon Knight. "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" � 1971 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in 
New Directions 1, edited by Robert Silverberg. "For Ted" � 1975 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared 
in Wild Angels by Ursula K. Le Guin, Capra Press, 1975. "Totem" � 1981 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first 
appeared in Hard Words by Ursula K. Le Guin, Harper & Row, 1981. "Winter Downs" � 1981 by 
Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Hard Words by Ursula K. Le Guin, Harper & Row, 1981. "The 
White Donkey" � 1980 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in TriQuarterh, Fall 1980. "Horse Camp" 
� 1986 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The New Yorker, August 25, 1986. "Shrodinger's Cat" 
� 1974 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Universe 5, edited by Terry Carr. "The Author of the 
Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts From the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics" � 1974 by 
Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Fellowship of the Stars, edited by Terry Carr. "May's Lion" � 1983 
by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Little Magazine, Volume 14, combined Numbers I & 2. 
"She Unnames Them" � 1985 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The New Yorker, January 21, 
1985. Copyright � 1987 by Ursula K. Le Guin 
All rights reserved. For information address Capra Press, P.O. Box 2068, Santa Barbara, California 
93120. 
This is an authorized reprint of a hardcover edition published by Capra Press. 
PLUME TRADEMARK REO. US PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES REGISTERED 
TRADEMARK�MARCA REGISTRADA HECHO EN CHICAGO. U.S.A. 
SIGNET, SIGNET CLASSIC, MENTOR, ONYX, PLUME, MERIDIAN 
and NAL BOOKS are published in the United States by NAL PENGUIN INC., 
1633 Broadway, New York, New York 10019, 
in Canada by The New American Library of Canada Limited, 

81 Mack Avenue, Scarborough, Ontario MIL IMS 
Library of Congress Cataloging-ln-Publication 
LeGuin, Ursula K., 1929- 
Buffalo gals and other animal presences / by Ursula K. Le Guin. p. cm. 
ISBN 0-452-26139-2 (pbk.) 
1. Animals�Literary collections. I. Title. 
[PS3562.E42B8 1988] 88-15583 813'.54�dc!9 
CIP Design and typography by Jim Cook (Santa Barbara, California). First Plume Printing, September, 
1988 123456789 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
Contents 
Introduction .......................... 9 
"Come Into Animal Presence" (Denise Levertov) .................... 14 
I. Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight .... 17 
II. Three Rock Poems .................... 55 
The Basalt ......................... 56 
Flints ............................ 56 
Mt St Helens/Omphalos ................ 57 
III. "The Wife's Story" and "Mazes" ............ 61 
Mazes ............................ 61 
The Wife's Story ...................... 67 
IV. Five Vegetable Poems .................. 75 

Torrey Pines Reserve ................... 76 
Lewis and Clark and After ............... 77 
West Texas ......................... 77 
Xmas Over ......................... 78 
The Crown of Laurel................... 78 
V. "The Direction of the Road" and "Vaster Than Empires" .................. 83 
The Direction of the Road ............... 84 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow ......... 92 
VI. Seven Bird and Beast Poems ............. 131 
What is Going on in the Oaks ............ 132 
ForTed .......................... 133 
Found Poem ....................... 134 
Totem ........................... 134 
Winter Downs ...................... 135 
The Man Eater ..................... 135 
SleepingOut ....................... 136 
VII. "The White Donkey" and "Horse Camp" ..... 139 
The White Donkey ................... 140 
Horse Camp ....................... 143 
VIII. Four Cat Poems ..................... 151 
Tabby Lorenzo ...................... 152 
Black Leonard in Negative Space .......... 152 

A Conversation With a Silence ........... 153 
For Leonard, Darko, and Burton Watson ..... 153 
IX "Schrodinger's Cat" and 
"The Author of the Acacia Seeds" .......... 157 
SchrOdinger's Cat .................... 158 
The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of Therolinguistics ....... 167 
X. "May's Lion" ....................... 179 
May's Lion ........................ 179 
XI. Rilke's "Eighth Duino Elegy" and ;, "She Unnames Them" ................. 191 | 
The Eighth Elegy, from the f Duino Elegies of RM. Rilke ............. 191 
She Unnames Them .................. 194 
Buffalo 
Gals 
Introduction 
ALTHOUGH I WHINED and tried to hide under the rug my inexorable publisher demanded an 
introduction for this book of my stories and poems about animals. Having done introductions before, I 
have found that many readers loathe them, reviewers sneer at them, and critics dismiss them; and then 
they all tell me so. As for myself I rather like introductions, but generally read them after reading what 
they were supposed to introduce me to. Read as extra-ductions, they are often interesting and useful. But 
that won't do. Ductions must be intro, and come first, like salad in restaurants, a lot of cardboard lettuce 
with bits of red wooden cabbage soaked in dressing so that you're disabled for the entree. 
The kind of introduction that conies naturally is oral. Reading aloud to an audience, one often talks a 
little about what one is going to read; and so for each section of this book I have tried to write down the 
kind of thing I might say about the pieces if I were performing them. 
As for the book as a whole: first of all I am grateful to my inexorable publisher for having the idea of 
doing such a collection, and for asking me to write a long new story for it It was his request that gave me 

the story "Buffalo Gals." Three other stories have not been printed in book form before, and twelve of 
the poems have not been printed anywhere till now. They are not all exactly about animals. In fact this is 
a sort of Twenty Questions anthology� 
9
10 JT BUFFALO GALS 
animal, vegetable, or mineral? But the animals, naturally, are more active. And more talkative. 
What about talking animals, anyhow? 
In his literary biography of Rudyard Kipling so sympathetic and perceptive a reader/writer as Angus 
Wilson dismisses the Jungle Books as schoolboy stories with animal costumes, and has no truck at all 
with the fust So Stories. As I think the Jungle Books, along with the other "children's story," Kim, are 
Kipling's finest work, and consider the fust So Stories a unique and miraculous interaction of prose with 
poetry with graphics, of adult mind with child mind, and of written with oral literature�a shining 
intersection among endless dreary one-way streets�so Wilson's dismissal of them was something I 
needed to understand. Not that it was anything unusual. Critical terror of Kiddilit is common. People to 
whom sophistication is a positive intellectual value shun anything "written for children"; if you want to 
clear the room of derrideans, mention Beatrix Potter without sneering. With the agreed exception of 
Alice in Wonderland, books for children are to be mentioned only dismissively or jocosely by the adult 
male critic. Just as Angus Wilson used to dismiss Virginia Woolf uncomfortably, jocosely, as a lady 
novelist, though he finally and creditably admitted that he might have missed something there... In 
literature as in "real life," women, children, and animals are the obscure matter upon which Civilization 
erects itself, phallologically. That they are Other is (vide Lacan etal.} the foundation of language, the 
Father Tongue. If Man vs. Nature is the name of the game, no wonder the team players kick out all these 
non-men who won't learn the rules and run around the cricket pitch squeaking and barking and 
chattering! But then, who are the Bandar-Log? Why do animals in kids' books talk? Why do animals in 
myths talk? How come the prince eats a burned fish-scale 
Introduction'^. 11 
and all of a sudden understands what the mice in the wall are saying about the kingdom? How come on 
Christmas night the beasts in the stables speak to one another in human voices? Why does the tortoise 
say, "111 race you," to the hare, and how does Coyote tell Death, "111 do exactly what you tell me!" 
Animals don't talk�everybody knows that Everybody, including quite small children, and the men and 
women who told and tell talking-animal stories, knows that animals are dumb: have no words of their 
own. So why do we keep putting words into their mouths? 
We who? We the dumb: the others. 
In the dreadful self-isolation of the Church, that soul-fortress towering over the dark abysms of the 

bestial/ mortal/World/Hell, for St Francis to cry out "Sister sparrow, brother wolf!" was a great thing. 
But for the Buddha to be a jackal or a monkey was no big deal. And for the people Civilization calls 
"primitive," "savage," or "undeveloped," including young children, the continuity, interdependence, and 
community of all life, all forms of being on earth, is a lived fact, made conscious in narrative (myth, 
ritual, fiction). This continuity of existence, neither benevolent nor cruel itself, is fundamental to 
whatever morality may be built upon it Only Civilization builds its morality by denying its foundation. 
By climbing up into his head and shutting out every voice but his own, "Civilized Man" has gone deaf. 
He can't hear the wolf calling him brother�not Master, but brother. He can't hear the earth calling him 
child�not Father, but son. He hears only his own words making up the world. He can't hear the animals, 
they have nothing to say. Children babble, and have to be taught how to climb up into their heads and 
shut the doors of perception. No use teaching women at all, they talk all the time, of course, but never 
say anything. This is the myth of Civilization, embodied in the monotheisms which assign soul to Man 
alone. 
12.^BUFFALO GALS 
Introduction ~^~ 13 
And so it is this myth which all talking-animal stories mock, or simply subvert So long as "man" "rules," 
animals will make rude remarks about him. Women and unruly men will tell their daughters and sons 
what the fox said to the ox, what Raven told South Wind. And the cat will say, "I am the Cat that walks 
by himself, and all places are alike to me!" And the Man, infuriated by this failure to acknowledge 
Hierarchy, will throw his boots and his little stone ax (that makes three) at the Cat Only when the Man 
listens, and attends, O Best Beloved, and hears, and understands, will the Cat return to the Cat's true 
silence. 
When the word is not sword, but shuttle. 
But still there will be stories, there will always be stories, in which the lion's mother scolds the lion, and 
the fish cries out to the fisherman, and the cat talks; because it is true that all creatures talk to one 
another, if only one listens. 
This conversation, this community, is not a simple harmony. The Peaceable Kingdom, where lion and 
lamb lie down, is an endearing vision not of this world. It denies wilderness. And voices cry in the 
wilderness. 
Users of words to get outside the head with, rash poets get caught in the traps set for animals. Some, 
unable to endure the cruelty, maim themselves to escape. Robinson Jeffers's "Original Sin" describes the 
"happy hunters" of the Stone Age, puzzled how to kill the mammoth trapped in their pitfall, discovering 
that they can do so by building fires around it and roasting it alive all day. The poem ends: 
I would rather 

Be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man. But we are what we are, and we might remember Not to 
hate any person, for all are vicious; And not to be astonished at any evil, all are deserved; And not to 
fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed. 
This maybe wrongheaded, but I prefer it to the generous but sloppy identifications of Walt Whitman. 
Where Whitman takes the animal into his vast, intensely civilized ego, possesses it, engulfs and 
annihilates it, Jeffers at least reaches out and touches the animal, the Other, through pain, and releases it 
But the touching hand is crippled. Perhaps it is only when the otherness, the difference, the space 
between us (in which both cruelty and love occur) is perceived as holy ground, as the sacred place, that 
we can "come into animal presence"�the title of Denise Lever-toVs poem, which honors my book, and 
stands here as its true introduction. 
14 JT BUFFALO GALS 
Come into Animal Presence 
Come into animal presence. 
No man is so guileless as 
the serpent The lonely white 
rabbit on the roof is a star f 
twitching its ears at the rain. 
The llama intricately 
folding its hind legs to be seated 
not disdains but mildly 
disregards human approval. 
What joy when the insouciant 
armadillo glances at us and doesn't 
quicken his trotting 
across the track into the palm bush. 

What is this joy? That no animal 
falters, but knows what it must do? 
That the snake has no blemish, 
that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings 
in white star-silence? The llama 
rests in dignity, the armadillo 
has some intention to pursue in the palm forest 
Those who were sacred have remained so, 
holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence 
of bronze, only the sight that saw it 
faltered and turned from it. 
An old joy returns in holy presence. 
�DENISE LEVERTOV 
Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight 
"YOU FELL OUT OF THE SKY," the coyote said. 
Still curled up tight, lying on her side, her back pressed against the overhanging rock, the child watched 
the coyote with one eye. Over the other eye she kept her hand cupped, its back on the dirt 
"There was a burned place in the sky, up there alongside the rimrock, and then you fell out of it," the 
coyote repeated, patiently, as if the news was getting a bit stale. "Are you hurt?" 
She was all right She was in the plane with Mr. Michaels, and the motor was so loud she couldn't 
understand what he said even when he shouted, and the way the wind rocked the wings was making her 
feel sick, but it was all right They were flying to Canyonville. In the plane. 
She looked. The coyote was still sitting there. It yawned. It was a big one, in good condition, its coat 
silvery and thick The dark tear-line from its long yellow eye was as clearly marked as a tabby cat's. 

She sat up, slowly, still holding her right hand pressed to her right eye. 
"Did you lose an eye?" the coyote asked, interested. 
"I don't know," the child said. She caught her breath and shivered. "I'm cold." 
17 
18 jy BUFFALO GALS 
"I'll help you look for it," the coyote said. "Come on! If you move around you won't have to shiver. The 
sun's up." 
Cold lonely brightness lay across the falling land, a hundred miles of sagebrush. The coyote was trotting 
busily around, nosing under clumps of rabbit-brush and cheat-grass, pawing at a rock. "Aren't you going 
to look?" it said, suddenly sitting down on its haunches and abandoning the search. "I knew a trick once 
where I could throw my eyes way up into a tree and see everything from up there, and then whistle, and 
they'd come back into my head. But that goddam bluejay stole them, and when I whistled nothing came. 
I had to stick lumps of pine pitch into my head so I could see anything. You could try that But you've 
got one eye that's OK, what do you need two for? Are you coming, or are you dying there?" 
The child crouched, shivering. 
"Well, come if you want to," said the coyote, yawned again, snapped at a flea, stood up, turned, and 
trotted away among the sparse clumps of rabbit-brush and sage, along the long slope that stretched on 
down and down into the plain streaked across by long shadows of sagebrush. The slender, grey-yellow 
animal was hard to keep in sight, van-] ishing as the child watched. 
She struggled to her feet, and without a word, though she kept saying in her mind, "Wait, please wait," 
she hobbled after the coyote. She could not see it She kept her hand pressed over the right eyesocket 
Seeing with one eye the was no depth; it was like a huge, flat picture. The coyot suddenly sat in the 
middle of the picture, looking back at1 her, its mouth open, its eyes narrowed, grinning. Her legs began 
to steady and her head did not pound so hard, though the deep, black ache was always there. She had 
nearly caught up to the coyote when it trotted off again. This time she spoke. "Please wait!" she said. 
"OK," said the coyote, but it trotted right on. Shef 
Won't You Come Out Tonight^ 19 
followed, walking downhill into the flat picture that at each step was deep. 
Each step was different underfoot; each sage bush was different, and all the same. Following the coyote 
she came out from the shadow of the rimrock cliffs, and the sun at eyelevel dazzled her left eye. Its 

bright warmth soaked into her muscles and bones at once. The air, that all night had been so hard to 
breathe, came sweet and easy. 
The sage bushes were pulling in their shadows and the sun was hot on the child's back when she 
followed the coyote along the rim of a gu%- After a while the coyote slanted down the undercut slope 
and the child scrambled after, through scrub willows to the thin creek in its wide sandbed. Both drank 
The coyote crossed the creek, not with a careless charge and splashing like a dog, but singlefoot and 
quiet like a cat; always it carried its tail low. The child hesitated, knowing that wet shoes make blistered 
feet, and then waded across in as few steps as possible. Her right arm ached with the effort of holding 
her hand up over her eye. "I need a bandage," she said to the coyote. It cocked its head and said nothing. 
It stretched out its forelegs and lay watching the water, resting but alert. The child sat down nearby on 
the hot sand and tried to move her right hand. It was glued to the skin around her eye by dried blood. At 
the little tearing-away pain, she whimpered; though it was a small pain it frightened her. The coyote 
came over close and poked its long snout into her face. Its strong sharp smell was in her nostrils. It 
began to lick the awful, aching blindness, cleaning and cleaning with its curled, precise, strong, wet 
tongue, until the child was able to cry a little with relief, being comforted. Her head was bent close to the 
grey-yellow ribs, and she saw the hard nipples, the whitish belly-fur. She put her arm around the shecoyote, 
stroking the harsh coat over back and ribs. 
20 JT BUFFALO GALS 
"OK," the coyote said, 'let's go!" And set off without a backward glance. The child scrambled to her feet 
and followed. "Where are we going?" she said, and the coyote, trotting on down along the creek, 
answered, "On down along the creek..." 
There must have been a while she was asleep while she walked, because she felt like she was waking up, 
but she was walking along, only in a different place. She didn't know how she knew it was different 
They were still following the creek, though the gully was flattened out to nothing much, and there was 
still sagebrush range as far as the eye could see. The eye�the good one�felt rested. The other one still 
ached, but not so sharply, and there was no use thinking about it But where was the coyote? 
She stopped. The pit of cold into which the plane had fallen re-opened and she fell. She stood falling a 
thin whimper making itself in her throat 
"Over here!" 
The child turned. She saw a coyote gnawing at the half-dried-up carcass of a crow, black feathers 
sticking to the black lips and narrow jaw. 
She saw a tawny-skinned woman kneeling by a campfire, sprinkling something into a conical pot She 
heard the water boiling in the pot, though it was propped between rocks, off the fire. The woman's hair 
was yellow and grey, bound back with a string. Her feet were bare. The upturned soles looked as dark 

and hard as shoe soles, but the arch of the foot was high, and the toes made two neat curving rows. She 
wore bluejeans and an old white shirt She looked over at the girl. "Come on, eat crow!" she said. The 
child slowly came toward the woman and the fire, and squatted down. She had stopped falling and felt 
very light and empty; and her tongue was like a piece of wood stuck in her mouth. 
Wont You Come Out Tonight^. 21 
Coyote was now blowing into the pot or basket or whatever it was. She reached into it with two fingers, 
and pulled her hand away shaking it and shouting "Ow! Shit! Why don't I ever have any spoons?" She 
broke off a dead twig of sagebrush, dipped it into the pot, and licked it "Oh, boy," she said. "Come on!" 
The child moved a little closer, broke off a twig dipped. Lumpy pinkish mush clung to the twig She 
licked. The taste was rich and delicate. 
"What is it?" she asked after a long time of dipping and licking. 
"Food. Dried salmon mush," Coyote said. "It's cooling down." She stuck two fingers into the mush 
again, this time getting a good load, which she ate very neatly. The child, when she tried, got mush all 
over her chin. It was like chopsticks, it took practice. She practiced. They ate turn and turn until nothing 
was left in the pot but three rocks. The child did not ask why mere were rocks in the mush-pot They 
licked the rocks clean. Coyote licked out the inside of the pot-basket, rinsed it once in the creek, and put 
it onto her head. It fit nicely, making a conical hat She pulled off her bluejeans. "Piss on the fire!" she 
cried, and did so, standing straddling it "Ah, steam between the legs!" she said. The child, embarrassed, 
thought she was supposed to do the same thing, but did not want to, and did not Bareassed, Coyote 
danced around the dampened fire, kicking her long thin legs out and singing, 
"Buffalo gals, won't you come out tonight, Come out tonight, come out tonight, Buffalo gals, won't you 
come out tonight, And dance by the light of the moon?" 
She pulled her jeans back on. The child was burying the remains of the fire in creek-sand, heaping it 
over, seriously, wanting to do right Coyote watched her. 
22 JT BUFFALO GALS 
"Is that you?" she said. "A Buffalo Gal? What happened to the rest of you?" 
"The rest of me?" The child looked at herself, alarmed. 
"All your people." 
"Oh. Well, Mom took Bobbie, he's my little brother, away with Uncle Norm. He isn't really my uncle, or 
anything. So Mr. Michaels was going there anyway so he was going to fly me over to my real father, in 
Canyonville. Linda, my stepmother, you know, she said it was OK for the summer anyhow if I was 

there, and then we could see. But the plane." 
In the silence the girl's face became dark red, then greyish white. Coyote watched, fascinated. "Oh," the 
girl said, "Oh� Oh�Mr. Michaels�he must be�Did the�" 
"Come on!" said Coyote, and set off walking. 
The child cried, "I ought to go back �" 
"What for?" said Coyote. She stopped to look round at the child, then went on faster. "Come on, Gal!" 
She said it as a name; maybe it was the child's name, Myra, as spoken by Coyote. The child, confused 
and despairing protested again, but followed her. "Where are we going? Where are we?" 
"This is my country," Coyote answered, with dignity, making a long, slow gesture all round the vast 
horizon. "I made it. Every goddam sage bush." 
And they went on. Coyote's gait was easy, even a little shambling, but she covered the ground; the child 
struggled not to drop behind. Shadows were beginning to pull themselves out again from under the rocks 
and shrubs. Leaving the creek, they went up a long, low, uneven slope that ended away off against the 
sky in rimrock. Dark trees stood one here, another way over there; what people called a juniper forest, a 
desert forest, one with a lot more between the trees than trees. Each juniper they passed smelled sharply, 
cat-pee smell the kids at school called it, but the child liked it; it seemed to go into her mind and wake 
her 
Won't You Come Out Tonight^)-23 
up. She picked off a juniper berry and held it in her mouth, but after a while spat it out The aching was 
coming back in huge black waves, and she kept stumbling. She found that she was sitting down on the 
ground. When she tried to get up her legs shook and would not go under her. She felt foolish and 
frightened, and began to cry. 
"We're home!" Coyote called from way on up the hill. 
The child looked with her one weeping eye, and saw sagebrush, juniper, cheatgrass, rimrock. She heard 
a coyote yip far off in the dry twilight 
She saw a little town up under the rimrock, board houses, shacks, all unpainted. She heard Coyote call 
again, "Come on, pup! Come on, Gal, we're home!" She could not get up, so she tried to go on all fours, 
the long way up the slope to the houses under the rimrock. Long before she got there, several people 
came to meet her. They were all children, she thought at first, and then began to understand that most of 
them were grown people, but all were very short; they were broad-bodied, fat, with fine, delicate hands 
and feet Their eyes were bright Some of the women helped her stand up and walk, coaxing her, "It isn't 
much farther, you're doing fine." In the late dusk lights shone yellow-bright through doorways and 

through unchinked cracks between boards. Woodsmoke hung sweet in the quiet air. The short people 
talked and laughed all the time, softly. "Where's she going to stay?"�"Put her in with Robin, they're all 
asleep already!"�"Oh, she can stay with us." 
The child asked hoarsely, "Where's Coyote?" 
"Out hunting" the short people said. 
A deeper voice spoke: "Somebody new has come into town?" 
"Yes, a new person," one of the short men answered. 
Among these people the deep-voiced man bulked impressive; he was broad and tall, with powerful 
hands, a big head, 
24 JT BUFFALO GALS 
a short neck. They made way for him respectfully. He moved very quietly, respectful of them also. His 
eyes when he stared down at the child were amazing. When he blinked, it was like the passing of a hand 
before a candle-flame. 
"It's only an owlet," he said. "What have you let happen to your eye, new person?" 
"I was�We were flying�" 
"You're too young to fly," the big man said in his deep, soft voice. "Who brought you here?" 
"Coyote." 
And one of the short people confirmed: "She came here with Coyote, Young Owl." 
"Then maybe she should stay in Coyote's house tonight," the big man said. 
"It's all bones and lonely in there," said a short woman with fat cheeks and a striped shirt "She can come 
with us." 
That seemed to decide it The fat-cheeked woman patted the child's arm and took her past several shacks 
and shanties to a low, windowless house. The doorway was so low even the child had to duck down to 
enter. There were a lot of people inside, some already there and some crowding in after the fat-cheeked 
woman. Several babies were fast asleep in cradle-boxes in corners. There was a good fire, and a good 
smell, like toasted sesame seeds. The child was given food, and ate a little, but her head swam and the 
blackness in her right eye kept coming across her left eye so she could not see at all for a while. Nobody 
asked her name or told her what to call them. She heard the children call the fat-cheeked woman 

Chipmunk. She got up courage finally to say, "Is there somewhere I can go to sleep, Mrs. Chipmunk?" 
"Sure, come on," one of the daughters said, "in here," and took the child into a back room, not 
completely partitioned off from the crowded front room, but dark and 
Won't You Come Out Tbnight ^ 25 
uncrowded. Big shelves with mattresses and blankets lined the walls. "Crawl in!" said Chipmunk's 
daughter, patting the child's arm in the comforting way they had. The child climbed onto a shelf, under a 
blanket She laid down her head. She thought, "I didn't brush my teeth." 
u
She woke; she slept again. In Chipmunk's sleeping room it was always stuffy, warm, and half-dark, day 
and night People came in and slept and got up and left, night and day. She dozed and slept, got down to 
drink from the bucket and dipper in the front room, and went back to sleep and doze. 
She was sitting up on the shelf, her feet dangling not feeling bad any more, but dreamy, weak. She felt in 
her jeans pockets. In the left front one was a pocket comb and a bubblegum wrapper, in the right front, 
two dollar bills and a quarter and a dime. 
Chipmunk and another woman, a very pretty dark-eyed plump one, came in. "So you woke up for your 
dance!" Chipmunk greeted her, laughing and sat down by her with an arm around her. 
"Jay's giving you a dance," the dark woman said. "He's going to make you all right Let's get you all 
ready!" 
There was a spring up under the rimrock, that flattened out into a pool with slimy, reedy shores. A flock 
of noisy children splashing in it ran off and left the child and the two women to bathe. The water was 
warm on the surface, cold down on the feet and legs. All naked, the two soft-voiced laughing women, 
their round bellies and breasts, broad hips and buttocks gleaming warm in the late afternoon light, 
sluiced the child down, washed and stroked her limbs and hands and hair, cleaned around the cheekbone 
and eyebrow of her right eye with infinite softness, admired 
26^BUFFALO GALS 
her, sudsed her, rinsed her, splashed her out of the water, dried her off, dried each other off, got dressed, 
dressed her, braided her hair, braided each other's hair, tied feathers on the braid-ends, admired her and 
each other again, and brought her back down into the little straggling town and to a kind of playing field 
or dirt parking lot in among the houses. There were no streets, just paths and dirt, no lawns and gardens, 
just sagebrush and dirt Quite a few people were gathering or wandering around the open place, looking 
dressed up, wearing colorful shirts, print dresses, strings of beads, earrings. "Hey there, Chipmunk, 
Whitefoot!" they greeted the women. 

A man in new jeans, with a bright blue velveteen vest over a clean, faded blue workshirt, came forward 
to meet them, very handsome, tense, and important. "All right, Gal!" he said in a harsh, loud voice, 
which startled among all these soft-speaking people. "We're going to get that eye fixed right up tonight! 
You just sit down here and don't worry about a thing." He took her wrist, gently despite his bossy, brassy 
manner, and led her to a woven mat that lay on the dirt near the middle of the open place. There, feeling 
very foolish, she had to sit down, and was told to stay still. She soon got over feeling that everybody was 
looking at her, since nobody paid her more attention than a checking glance or, from Chipmunk or 
Whitefoot and their families, a reassuring wink. Every now and then Jay rushed over to her and said 
something like, "Going to be as good as new!" and went off again to organize people, waving his long 
blue arms and shouting. 
Coming up the hill to the open place, a lean, loose, tawny figure�and the child started to jump up, 
remembered she was to sit still, and sat still, calling out softly, "Coyote! Coyote!" 
Coyote came lounging by. She grinned. She stood looking down at the child. "Don't let that Bluejay fuck 
you up, Gal," she said, and lounged on. 
Won't You Come Out Tonight*^ 27 
The child's gaze followed her, yearning. 
People were sitting down now over on one side of the open place, making an uneven half-circle that kept 
getting added to at the ends until there was nearly a circle of people sitting on the dirt around the child, 
ten or fifteen paces from her. All the people wore the kind of clothes the child was used to, jeans and 
jeans-jackets, shirts, vests, cotton dresses, but they were all barefoot; and she thought they were more 
beautiful than the people she knew, each in a different way, as if each one had invented beauty. Yet 
some of them were also very strange: thin black shining people with whispery voices, a long-legged 
woman with eyes like jewels. The big man called Young Owl was there, sleepy-looking and dignified, 
like Judge McCown who owned a sixty-thousand acre ranch; and beside him was a woman the child 
thought might be his sister, for like him she had a hook nose and big, strong hands; but she was lean and 
dark, and there was a crazy look in her fierce eyes. Yellow eyes, but round, not long and slanted like 
Coyote's. There was Coyote sitting yawning, scratching her armpit, bored. Now somebody was entering 
the circle: a man, wearing only a kind of kilt and a cloak painted or beaded with diamond shapes, 
dancing to the rhythm of the rattle he carried and shook with a buzzing fast beat His limbs and body 
were thick yet supple, his movements smooth and pouring. The child kept her gaze on him as he danced 
past her, around her, past again. The rattle in his hand shook almost too fast to see, in the other hand was 
something thin and sharp. People were singing around the circle now, a few notes repeated in time to the 
rattle, soft and tuneless. It was exciting and boring, strange and familiar. The Rattler wove his dancing 
closer and closer to her, darting at her. The first time she flinched away, frightened by the lunging 
movement and by his flat, cold face with narrow eyes, but after that she sat still, knowing her part The 
dancing went 

28 JT BUFFALO GALS 
on, the singing went on, till they carried her past boredom into a floating that could go on forever. 
Jay had come strutting into the circle, and was standing beside her. He couldn't sing but he called out, 
"Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!" in his big harsh voice, and everybody answered from all round, and the echo 
came down from the rimrock on the second beat. Jay was holding up a stick with a ball on it in one 
hand, and something like a marble in the other. The stick was a pipe: he got smoke into his mouth from 
it and blew it in four directions and up and down and then over the marble, a puff each time. Then the 
rattle stopped suddenly, and everything was silent for several breaths. Jay squatted down and looked 
intently into the child's face, his head cocked to one side. He reached forward, muttering something in 
time to the rattle and the singing that had started up again louder than before; he touched the child's right 
eye in the black center of the pain. She flinched and endured. His touch was not gentle. She saw the 
marble, a dull yellow ball like beeswax, in his hand; then she shut her seeing eye and set her teeth. 
"There!" Jay shouted. "Open up. Come on! Let's see!" 
Her jaw clenched like a vise, she opened both eyes. The lid of the right one stuck and dragged with such 
a searing white pain that she nearly threw up as she sat there in the middle of everybody watching. 
"Hey, can you see? How's it work? It looks great!" Jay was shaking her arm, railing at her. "How's it 
feel? Is it working?" 
What she saw was confused, hary, yellowish. She began to discover, as everybody came crowding 
around peering at her, smiling stroking and patting her arms and shoulders, that if she shut the hurting 
eye and looked with the other, everything was clear and flat; if she used them both, things were blurry 
and yellowish, but deep. 
There, right close, was Coyote's long nose and narrow 
Won't You Come Out Tonight*^ 29 
eyes and grin. "What is it, Jay?" she was asking peering at the new eye. "One of mine you stole that 
time?" 
"It's pine pitch," Jay shouted furiously. "You think I'd use some stupid secondhand coyote eye? I'm a 
doctor!" 
"Ooooh, ooooh, a doctor," Coyote said. "Boy, that is one ugly eye. Why didn't you ask Rabbit for a 
rabbit-dropping? That eye looks like shit" She put her lean face yet closer, till the child thought she was 
going to kiss her; instead, the thin, firm tongue once more licked accurate across the pain, cooling 
clearing When the child opened both eyes again the world looked pretty good. 

"It works fine," she said. 
"Hey!" Jay yelled. "She says it works fine! It works fine, she says so! I told you! What'd I tell you?" He 
went off waving his arms and yelling Coyote had disappeared. Everybody was wandering off. 
The child stood up, stiff from long sitting It was nearly dark; only the long west held a great depth of 
pale radiance. Eastward the plains ran down into night 
Lights were on in some of the shanties. Off at the edge of town somebody was playing a creaky fiddle, a 
lonesome chirping tune. 
A person came beside her and spoke quietly: "Where will you stay?" 
"I don't know," the child said. She was feeling extremely hungry. "Can I stay with Coyote?" 
"She isn't home much," the soft-voiced woman said. "You were staying with Chipmunk, weren't you? Or 
there's Rabbit, or Jackrabbit, they have families..." 
"Do you have a family?" the girl asked, looking at the delicate, soft-eyed woman. 
"Two fawns," the woman answered, smiling "But I just came into town for the dance." 
"I'd really like to stay with Coyote," the child said after a little pause, timid, but obstinate. 
30 JT BUFFALO GALS 
Won't You Come Out Tonight^ 31 
"OK, that's fine. Her house is over here." Doe walked along beside the child to a ramshackle cabin on 
the high edge of town. No light shone from inside. A lot of junk was scattered around the front. There 
was no step up to the half-open door. Over the door a battered pine board, nailed up crooked, said BIDEA-
WEE. 
"Hey, Coyote? Visitors," Doe said. Nothing happened. 
Doe pushed the door farther open and peered in. "She's out hunting, I guess. I better be getting back to 
the fawns. You going to be OK? Anybody else here will give you something to eat�you know... OK?" 
"Yeah. I'm fine. Thank you," the child said. 
She watched Doe walk away through the clear twilight, a severely elegant walk, small steps; like a 
woman in high heels, quick, precise, very light 

Inside Bide-A-Wee it was too dark to see anything and so cluttered that she fell over something at every 
step. She could not figure out where or how to light a fire. There was something that felt like a bed, but 
when she lay down on it, it felt more like a dirty-clothes pile, and smelt like one. Things bit her legs, 
arms, neck, and back. She was terribly hungry. By smell she found her way to what had to be a dead fish 
hanging from the ceiling in one corner. By feel she broke off a greasy flake and tasted it. It was smoked 
dried salmon. She ate one succulent piece after another until she was satisfied, and licked her fingers 
clean. Near the open door starlight shone on water in a pot of some kind; the child smelled it cautiously, 
tasted it cautiously, and drank just enough to quench her thirst, for it tasted of mud and was warm and 
stale. Then she went back to the bed of dirty clothes and fleas, and lay down. She could have gone to 
Chipmunk's house, or other friendly households; she thought of that as she lay forlorn in Coyote's dirty 
bed. But she did not go. She slapped at fleas until she fell asleep. 
Along in the deep night somebody said, "Move over, pup," and was warm beside her. 
Ifc 
Breakfast, eaten sitting in the sun in the doorway, was dried-salmon-powder mush. Coyote hunted, 
mornings and evenings, but what they ate was not fresh game but salmon, and dried stuff, and any 
berries in season. The child did not ask about this. It made sense to her. She was going to ask Coyote 
why she slept at night and waked in the day like humans, instead of the other way round like coyotes, 
but when she framed the question in her mind she saw at once that night is when you sleep and day 
when you're awake; that made sense too. But one question she did ask, one hot day when they were 
lying around slapping fleas. 
"I don't understand why you all look like people," she said. 
"We are people." 
"I mean, people like me, humans." 
"Resemblance is in the eye," Coyote said. "How is that lousy eye, by the way?" 
"It's fine. But�like you wear clothes�and live in houses �with fires and stuff�" 
"That's what you think... If that loudmouth Jay hadn't horned in, I could have done a really good job." 
The child was quite used to Coyote's disinclination to stick to any one subject, and to her boasting. 
Coyote was like a lot of kids she knew, in some respects. Not in others. 
"You mean what I'm seeing isn't true? Isn't real�like on TV, or something?" 
"No," Coyote said. "Hey, that's a tick on your collar." She reached over, flicked the tick off, picked it up 
on one finger, bit it, and spat out the bits. 

"Yecch!" the child said. "So?" 
"So, to me you're basically greyish yellow and run on four legs. To that lot�" she waved disdainfully at 
the warren of little houses next down the hill�"you hop around twitching your nose all the time. To 
Hawk, you're 
32 JT BUFFALO GALS 
an egg, or maybe getting pinfeathers. See? It just depends on how you look at things. There are only two 
kinds of people." 
"Humans and animals?" 
"No. The kind of people who say, There are two kinds of people' and the kind of people who don't" 
Coyote cracked up, pounding her thigh and yelling with delight at her joke. The child didn't get it, and 
waited. 
"OK," Coyote said. "There's the first people, and then the others. That's the two kinds." 
"The first people are�?" 
"Us, the animals... and things. All the old ones. You know. And you pups, kids, fledglings. All first 
people." 
"And the�others?" 
"Them," Coyote said. "You know. The others. The new people. The ones who came." Her fine, hard face 
had gone serious, rather formidable. She glanced directly, as she seldom did, at the child, a brief gold 
sharpness. "We were here," she said. "We were always here. We are always here. Where we are is here. 
But it's their country now. They're running it... Shit, even I did better!" 
The child pondered and offered a word she had used to hear a good deal: "They're illegal immigrants." 
"Illegal!" Coyote said, mocking, sneering. "Illegal is a sick bird. What the fuck's illegal mean? You want 
a code of justice from a coyote? Grow up, kid!" 
"I don't want to." 
"You don't want to grow up?" 
"IH be the other kind if I do." 

"Yeah. So," Coyote said, and shrugged. "That's life." She got up and went around the house, and the 
child heard her pissing in the back yard. 
A lot of things were hard to take about Coyote as a mother. When her boyfriends came to visit, the child 
learned to go stay with Chipmunk or the Rabbits for the 
Won't You Come Out Tonight^ 33 
night, because Coyote and her friend wouldn't even wait to get on the bed but would start doing that 
right on the floor or even out in the yard. A couple of times Coyote came back late from hunting with a 
friend, and the child had to lie up against the wall in the same bed and hear and feel them doing that 
right next to her. It was something like fighting and something like dancing, with a beat to it, and she 
didn't mind too much except that it made it hard to stay asleep. 
Once she woke up and one of Coyote's friends was stroking her stomach in a creepy way. She didn't 
know what to do, but Coyote woke up and realized what he was doing bit him hard, and kicked him out 
of bed. He spent the night on the floor, and apologized next morning�"Aw, hell, Ki, I forgot the kid 
was there, I thought it was you�" 
Coyote, unappeased, yelled, "You think I don't got any standards? You think I'd let some coyote rape a 
kid in my bed?" She kicked him out of the house, and grumbled about him all day. But a while later he 
spent the night again, and he and Coyote did that three or four times. 
Another thing that was embarrassing was the way Coyote peed anywhere, taking her pants down in 
public. But most people here didn't seem to care. The thing that worried the child most, maybe, was 
when Coyote did number two anywhere and then turned around and talked to it That seemed so awful. 
As if Coyote was�the way she often seemed, but really wasn't�crazy. 
The child gathered up all the old dry turds from around the house one day while Coyote was having a 
nap, and buried them in a sandy place near where she and Bobcat and some of the other people generally 
went and did and buried their number twos. 
Coyote woke up, came lounging out of Bide-A-Wee, rubbing her hands through her thick, fair, greyish 
hair and yawning, looked all around once with those narrow eyes, 
34 JT BUFFALO GALS 
and said, "Hey! Where are they?" Then she shouted, "Where are you? Where are you?" 
And a faint, muffled chorus came from over in the sandy draw, "Mommy! Mommy! We're here!" 
Coyote trotted over, squatted down, raked out every turd, and talked with them for a long time. When 
she came back she said nothing, but the child, redfaced and heart pounding, said, "I'm sorry I did that" 

"It's just easier when they're all around close by," Coyote said, washing her hands (despite the filth of 
her house, she kept herself quite clean, in her own fashion.) 
"I kept stepping on them," the child said, trying to justify her deed. 
"Poor little shits," said Coyote, practicing dance-steps. 
"Coyote," the child said timidly. "Did you ever have any children? I mean real pups?" 
"Did I? Did I have children? Litters! That one that tried feeling you up, you know? that was my son. 
Pick of the litter... Listen, Gal. Have daughters. When you have anything, have daughters. At least they 
clear out" 
111 
The child thought of herself as Gal, but also sometimes as Myra. So far as she knew, she was the only 
person in town who had two names. She had to think about that, and about what Coyote had said about 
the two kinds of people; she had to think about where she belonged. Some persons in town made it clear 
that as far as they were concerned she didn't and never would belong there. Hawk's furious stare burned 
through her; the Skunk children made audible remarks about what she smelled like. And though Whitefoot 
and Chipmunk and their families were kind, it was the generosity of big families, where one more 
or less simply 
Won't You Come Out Tbnight^.35 
doesn't count If one of them, or Cottontail, or Jackrabbit, had come upon her in the desert lying lost and 
half-blind, would they have stayed with her, like Coyote? That was Coyote's craziness, what they called 
her craziness. She wasn't afraid. She went between the two kinds of people, she crossed over. Buck and 
Doe and their beautiful children weren't really afraid, because they lived so constantly in danger. The 
Rattler wasn't afraid, because he was so dangerous. And yet maybe he was afraid of her, for he never 
spoke, and never came close to her. None of them treated her the way Coyote did. Even among the 
children, her only constant playmate was one younger than herself, a preposterous and fearless little boy 
called Horned Toad Child. They dug and built together, out among the sagebrush, and played at hunting 
and gathering and keeping house and holding dances, all the great games. A pale, squatty child with 
fringed eyebrows, he was a self-contained but loyal friend; and he knew a good deal for his age. 
"There isn't anybody else like me here," she said, as they sat by the pool in the morning sunlight 
"There isn't anybody much like me anywhere," said Horned Toad Child. 
"Well, you know what I mean." 

"Yeah... There used to be people like you around, I guess." 
"What were they called?" 
"Oh�people. Like everybody..." 
"But where do my people live? They have towns. I used to live in one. I don't know where they are, is 
all. I ought to find out I don't know where my mother is now, but my daddy's in Canyonville. I was 
going there when." 
"Ask Horse," said Horned Toad Child, sagaciously. He had moved away from the water, which he did 
not like and never drank, and was plaiting rushes. 
"I don't know Horse." 
36 J? BUFFALO GALS 
"He hangs around the butte down there a lot of the time. He's waiting till his uncle gets old and he can 
kick him out and be the big honcho. The old man and the women don't want him around till then. Horses 
are weird. Anyway, he's the one to ask He gets around a lot And his people came here with the new 
people, that's what they say, anyhow." 
Illegal immigrants, the girl thought She took Horned Toad's advice, and one long day when Coyote was 
gone on one of her unannounced and unexplained trips, she took a pouchful of dried salmon and 
salmonberries and went off alone to the flat-topped butte miles away in the southwest 
There was a beautiful spring at the foot of the butte, and a trail to it with a lot of footprints on it She 
waited there under willows by the clear pool, and after a while Horse came running, splendid, with 
copper-red skin and long strong legs, deep chest, dark eyes, his black hair whipping his back as he ran. 
He stopped, not at all winded, and gave a snort as he looked at her. "Who are you?" 
Nobody in town asked that�ever. She saw it was true: Horse had come here with her people, people 
who had to ask each other who they were. 
"I live with Coyote," she said, cautiously. 
"Oh, sure, I heard about you," Horse said. He knelt to drink from the pool, long deep drafts, his hands 
plunged in the cool water. When he had drunk he wiped his mouth, sat back on his heels, and 
announced, "I'm going to be king." 
"King of the Horses?" 
"Right! Pretty soon now. I could lick the old man already, but I can wait Let him have his day," said 

Horse, vainglorious, magnanimous. The child gazed at him, in love already, forever. 
"I can comb your hair, if you like," she said. 
"Great!" said Horse, and sat still while she stood behind him, tugging her pocket comb through his 
coarse, black, shining yard-long hair. It took a long time to get it smooth. 
Won't You Come Out Tonight^ 37 
She tied it in a massive ponytail with willowbark whera she was done. Horse bent over the pool to 
admire himself. "That's great," he said. "That's really beautiful!" 
"Do you ever, go... where the other people are?" she asked in a low voice. 
He did not reply for long enough that she thought he wasn't going to; then he said, "You mean the metal 
places, the glass places? The holes? I go around them. There are all the walls now. There didn't used to 
be so many. Grandmother said there didn't used to be any walls. Do you know Grandmother?" he asked 
naively, looking at her with his great, dark eyes. 
'Your grandmother?" 
"Well, yes�Grandmother�You know. Who makes the web. Well, anyhow. I know there's some of my 
people, horses, there. I've seen them across the walls. They act really crazy. You know, we brought the 
new people here. They couldn't have got here without us, they only have two legs, and they have those 
metal shells. I can tell you that whole story. The King has to know the stories." 
"I like stories a lot" 
"It takes three nights to tell it What do you want to know about them?" 
"I was thinking that maybe I ought to go there. Where they are." 
"It's dangerous. Really dangerous. You can't go through �they'd catch you." 
"I'd just like to know the way." 
"I know the way," Horse said, sounding for the first time entirely adult and reliable; she knew he did 
know the way. "It's a long run for a colt" He looked at her again. "I Ve got a cousin with different-color 
eyes," he said, looking from her right to her left eye. "One brown and one blue. But she's an Appaloosa." 
"Bluejay made the yellow one," the child explained. "I 
38 JT BUFFALO GALS 

lost my own one. In the...when...You don't think l| could get to those places?" 
"Why do you want to?" 
"I sort of feel like I have to." 
Horse nodded. He got up. She stood still. 
"I could take you, I guess," he said. 
"Would you? When?" 
"Oh, now, I guess. Once I'm King I won't be able to leave, you know. Have to protect the women. And I 
sure wouldn't let my people get anywhere near those places!" A shudder ran right down his magnificent 
body, yet he said, with a toss of his head, "They couldn't catch me, of course, but the others can't run like 
I do..." 
"How long would it take us?" 
Horse thought a while. "Well, the nearest place like that is over by the red rocks. If we left now we'd be 
back here around tomorrow noon. It's just a little hole." 
She did not know what he meant by "a hole," but did not ask. 
"You want to go?" Horse said, flipping back his ponytail. 
"OK," the girl said, feeling the ground go out from under her. 
"Can you run?" 
She shook her head. "I walked here, though." 
Horse laughed, a large, cheerful laugh. "Come on," he said, and knelt and held his hands backturned like 
stirrups for her to mount to his shoulders. "What do they call you?" he teased, rising easily, setting right 
off at a jogtrot. "Gnat? Fly? Flea?" 
"Tick, because I stick!" the child cried, gripping the wil-lowbark tie of the black mane, laughing with 
delight at being suddenly eight feet tall and traveling across the desert without even trying, like the 
tumbleweed, as fast as the wind. 
Won't You Come Out Tonight ^39 

Moon, a night past full, rose to light the plains for them. Horse jogged easily on and on. Somewhere 
deep in the night they stopped at a Pygmy Owl camp, ate a little, and rested. Most of the owls were out 
hunting but an old lady entertained them at her campfire, telling them tales abbut the ghost of a cricket, 
about the great invisible people, tales that the child heard interwoven with her own dreams as she dozed 
and half-woke and dozed again. Then Horse put her up on his shoulders and on they went at a tireless 
slow lope. Moon went down behind them, and before them the sky paled into rose and gold. The soft 
nightwind was gone; the air was sharp, cold, still. On it, in it, there was a faint, sour smell of burning. 
The child felt Horse's gait change, grow tighter, uneasy. 
"Hey, Prince!" 
A small, slightly scolding voice: the child knew it, and placed it as soon as she saw the person sitting by 
a juniper tree, neatly dressed, wearing an old black cap. 
"Hey, Chickadee!" Horse said, coming round and stopping. The child had observed, back in Coyote's 
town, that everybody treated Chickadee with respect She didn't see why. Chickadee seemed an ordinary 
person, busy and talkative like most of the small birds, nothing like so endearing as Quail or so 
impressive as Hawk or Great Owl. 
"You're going on that way?" Chickadee asked Horse. 
"The little one wants to see if her people are livingthere," Horse said, surprising the child. Was that what 
she wanted? 
Chickadee looked disapproving, as she often did. She whistled a few notes thoughtfully, another of her 
habits, and then got up. "I'll come along." 
"That's great," Horse said, thankfully. 
"Ill scout," Chickadee said, and off she went, surprisingly fast, ahead of them, while Horse took up his 
steady long lope. 
40 JT BUFFALO GALS 
The sour smell was stronger in the air. 
Chickadee halted, way ahead of them on a slight rise, and stood still. Horse dropped to a walk, and then 
stopped. "There," he said in a low voice. 
The child stared. In the strange light and slight mist before sunrise she could not see clearly, and when 
she strained and peered she felt as if her left eye were not seeing at all. "What is it?" she whispered. 
"One of the holes. Across the wall�see?" 

It did seem there was a line, a straight, jerky line drawn across the sagebrush plain, and on the far side of 
it� nothing? Was it mist? Something moved there�"It's cattle!" she said. Horse stood silent, uneasy. 
Chickadee was coming back towards them. 
"It's a ranch," the child said. "That's a fence. There's a lot of Herefords." The words tasted like iron, like 
salt in her mouth. The things she named wavered in her sight and faded, leaving nothing�a hole in the 
world, a burned place like a cigarette bum. "Go closer!" she urged Horse. "I want to see." 
And as if he owed her obedience, he went forward, tense but unquestioning. 
Chickadee came up to them. "Nobody around," she said in her small, dry voice, "but there's one of those 
fast turtle things coming." 
Horse nodded, but kept going forward. 
Gripping his broad shoulders, the child stared into the blank, and as if Chickadee's words had focused 
her eyes, she saw again: the scattered whitefaces, a few of them looking up with bluish, rolling eyes� 
the fences�over the rise a chimneyed house-roof and a high barn�and then in the distance something 
moving fast, too fast, burning across the ground straight at them at terrible speed. "Run!" she yelled to 
Horse, "run away! Run!" As if released from bonds he wheeled and ran, flat out, in great reaching 
strides, away 
Won't You Come Out Tonight^. 41 
from sunrise, the fiery burning chariot, the smell of acid, iron, death. And Chickadee flew before them 
like a cinder on the air of dawn. 
IV 
"Horse?" Coyote said. "That prick? Catfood!" 
Coyote had been there when the child got home to Bide-A-Wee, but she clearly hadn't been worrying 
about where Gal was, and maybe hadn't even noticed she was gone. She was in a vile mood, and took it 
all wrong when the child tried to tell her where she had been. 
"If you're going to do damn fool things, next time do 'em with me, at least I'm an expert," she said, 
morose, and slouched out the door. The child saw her squatting down, poking an old, white turd with a 
stick, trying to get it to answer some question she kept asking it The turd lay obstinately silent Later in 
the day the child saw two coyote men, a young one and a mangy-looking older one, loitering around 
near the spring, looking over at Bide-A-Wee. She decided it would be a good night to spend somewhere 
else. 

The thought of the crowded rooms of Chipmunk's house was not attractive. It was going to be a warm 
night again tonight, and moonlit Maybe she would sleep outside. If she could feel sure some people 
wouldn't come around, like the Rattler... She was standing indecisive halfway through town when a dry 
voice said, "Hey, Gal." 
"Hey, Chickadee." 
The trim, black-capped woman was standing on her doorstep shaking out a rug. She kept her house neat, 
trim like herself. Having come back across the desert with her the child now knew, though she still could 
not have said, why Chickadee was a respected person. 
"I thought maybe I'd sleep out tonight," the child said, tentative. 
42 JT BUFFALO GALS 
"Unhealthy," said Chickadee. "What are nests for?" 
"Mom's kind of busy," the child said. 
'Tsk!" went Chickadee, and snapped the rug with dis-' � approving vigor. "What about your little friend? 
At least they're decent people." 
"Horny-toad? His parents are so shy..." 
"Well. Come in and have something to eat, anyhow," said Chickadee. 
The child helped her cook dinner. She knew now why there were rocks in the mush-pot 
"Chickadee," she said, "I still don't understand, can I ask you? Mom said it depends who's seeing it, but 
still, I mean if I see you wearing clothes and everything like humans, then how come you cook this way, 
in baskets, you know, and there aren't any�any of the things like they have� there where we were with 
Horse this morning?" 
"I don't know," Chickadee said. Her voice indoors was quite soft and pleasant "I guess we do things the 
way they always were done. When your people and my people lived together, you know. And together 
with everything else here. The rocks, you know. The plants and everything" She looked at the basket of 
willowbark, fernroot, and pitch, at the blackened rocks that were heating in the fire. "You see how it all 
goes together...? 
"But you have fire�That's different�" 
"Ah!" said Chickadee, impatient, "you people! Do you think you invented the sun?" 

She took up the wooden tongs, plopped the heated rocks into the water-filled basket with a terrific hiss 
and steam and loud bubblings. The child sprinkled in the pounded seeds, and stirred. 
Chickadee brought out a basket of fine blackberries. They sat on the newly-shaken-out rug and ate. The 
child's two-finger scoop technique with mush was now highly refined. 
Won't You Come Out Toni^it^L 43 
"Maybe I didn't cause the world," Chickadee said, "but I'm a better cook than Coyote." 
The child nodded, stuffing 
"I don't know why I made Horse go there," she said, after she had stuffed. "I got just as scared as him 
when I saw it But now I feel again like I have to go back there. But I want to stay here. With my, with 
Coyote. I don't understand." 
"When we lived together it was all one place," Chickadee said in her slow, soft home-voice. "But now 
the others, the new people, they live apart And their places are so heavy. They weigh down on our place, 
they press on it, draw it, suck it, eat it, eat holes in it, crowd it out... Maybe after a while longer there'll 
only be one place again, their place. And none of us here. I knew Bison, out over the mountains. I knew 
Antelope right here. I knew Grizzly and Grey-wolf, up west there. Gone. All gone. And the salmon you 
eat at Coyote's house, those are the dream salmon, those are the true food; but in the rivers, how many 
salmon now? The rivers that were red with them in spring? Who dances, now, when the First Salmon 
offers himself? Who dances by the river? Oh, you should ask Coyote about all this. She knows more 
than I do! But she forgets... She's hopeless, worse than Raven, she has to piss on every post, she's a 
terrible housekeeper..." Chickadee's voice had sharpened. She whistled a note or two, and said no more. 
After a while the child asked very softly, "Who is Grandmother?" 
"Grandmother," Chickadee said. She looked at the child, and ate several blackberries thoughtfully. She 
stroked the rug they sat on. 
"If I built the fire on the rug it would bum a hole in it," she said. "Right? So we build the fire on sand, on 
dirt... Things are woven together. So we call the weaver the Grandmother." She whistled four notes, 
looking up the smokehole. "After all," she added, "maybe all this place, the 
44 JT BUFFALO GALS 
other places too, maybe they're all only one side of the weaving. I don't know. I can only look with one 
eye at a \ time, how can I tell how deep it goes?" 
Lying that night rolled up in a blanket in Chickadee's back | yard, the child heard the wind soughing and 
storming in the cottonwoods down in the draw, and then slept deeply, weary from the long night before. 

Just at sunrise she woke. The eastern mountains were a cloudy dark red as if the level light shone 
through them as through a hand held before the fire. In the tobacco patch�the only farming anybody in 
this town did was to raise a little wild tobacco� Lizard and Beetle were singing some kind of growing 
song or blessing song, soft and desultory, huh-huh-huh-huh, huh-huh-huh-huh, and as she lay warmcurled 
on the ground the song made her feel rooted in the ground, cradled on it and in it, so where her 
fingers ended and the dirt began she did not know, as if she were dead, but she was wholly alive, she 
was the earth's life. She got up dancing, left the blanket folded neatly on Chickadee's neat and already 
empty bed, and danced up the hill to Bide-A-Wee. At the half-open door she sang 
"Danced with a gal with a hole in her stocking And her knees kept a knocking and her toes kept 
a rocking, 
Danced with a gal with a hole in her stocking, Danced by the light of the moon!" 
Coyote emerged, tousled and lurching, and eyed her narrowly. "Sheeeoot," she said. She sucked her 
teeth and then went to splash water all over her head from the gourd by the door. She shook her head 
and the water-drops flew. "Let's get out of here," she said. "I have had it I don't know what got into me. 
If I'm pregnant again, at my age, oh, shit Let's get out of town. I need a change of air." 
Wont You Come Out Tonight ^ 45 
In the foggy dark of the house, the child could see at least two coyote men sprawled snoring away on the 
bed and floor. Coyote walked over to the old white turd and kicked it "Why didn't you stop me?" she 
shouted. 
"I told you," the turd muttered sulkily. 
"Dumb shit," Coyote said. "Come on, Gal. Let's go. Where to?" She didn't wait for an answer. "I know. 
Come on!" 
And she set off through town at that lazy-looking rangy walk that was so hard to keep up with. But the 
child was full of pep, and came dancing, so that Coyote began dancing too, skipping and pirouetting and 
fooling around all the way down the long slope to the level plains. There she slanted their way off northeastward. 
Horse Butte was at their backs, getting smaller in the distance. 
Along near noon the child said, "I didn't bring anything to eat" 
"Something will turn up," Coyote said, "sure to." And pretty soon she turned aside, going straight to a 
tiny grey shack hidden by a couple of half-dead junipers and a stand of rabbit-brush. The place smelled 
terrible. A sign on the door said: FOX. PRIVATE. NO TRESPASSING!�but Coyote pushed it open, 
and trotted right back out with half a small smoked salmon. "Nobody home but us chickens," she said, 
grinning sweetly. 

"Isn't that stealing?" the child asked, worried. 
"Yes," Coyote answered, trotting on. 
They ate the fox-scented salmon by a dried-up creek, slept a while, and went on. 
Before long the child smelled the sour burning smell, and stopped. It was as if a huge, heavy hand had 
begun pushing her chest, pushing her away, and yet at the same time as if she had stepped into a strong 
current that drew her forward, helpless. 
"Hey, getting close!" Coyote said, and stopped to piss by a juniper stump. 
46 JT BUFFALO GALS 
"Close to what?" 
"Their town. See?" She pointed to a pair of sage-spotted hills. Between them was an area of greyish 
blank. 
"I don't want to go there." 
"We won't go all the way in. No way! We'll just get a little closer and look. It's fun," Coyote said, 
putting her head on one side, coaxing. "They do all these weird things in the air." 
The child hung back. 
Coyote became business-like, responsible. "We're going to be very careful," she announced. "And look 
out for big dogs, OK? Little dogs I can handle. Make a good lunch. Big dogs, it goes the other way. 
Right? Let's go, then." 
Seemingly as casual and lounging as ever, but with a tense alertness in the carriage of her head and the 
yellow glance of her eyes, Coyote led off again, not looking back; and the child followed. 
All around them the pressures increased. It was if the air itself was pressing on them, as if time was 
going too fast, too hard, not flowing but pounding, pounding, pounding, faster and harder till it buzzed 
like Rattler's rattle. Hurry, you have to hurry! everything said, there isn't time! everything said. Things 
rushed past screaming and shuddering Things turned, flashed, roared, stank, vanished. There was a boy 
�he came into focus all at once, but not on the ground: he was going along a couple of inches above the 
ground, moving very fast, bending his legs from side to side in a kind of frenzied swaying dance, and 
was gone. Twenty children sat in rows in the air all singing shrilly and then the walls closed over them. 
A basket no a pot no a can, a garbage can, full of salmon smelling wonderful no full of stinking 
deerhides and rotten cabbage stalks, keep out of it, Coyote! Where was she? 

"Mom!" the child called. "Mother!"�standing a moment at the end of an ordinary small-town street 
near the gas 
Won't You Come Out Tonight ^. 47 
station, and the next moment in a terror of blanknesses, invisible walls, terrible smells and pressures and 
the overwhelming rush of Time straight forward rolling her helpless as a twig in the race above a 
waterfall. She clung held on trying not to fall�"Mother!" 
Coyote was over by the big basket of salmon, approaching it, wary, but out in the open, in the full 
sunlight, in the full current. And a boy and a man borne by the same current were coming down the long 
sage-spotted hill behind the gas station, each with a gun, red hats, hunters, it was killing season. "Hell, 
will you look at that damn coyote in broad daylight big as my wife's ass," the man said, and cocked 
aimed shot all as Myra screamed and ran against the enormous drowning torrent Coyote fled past her 
yelling "Get out of here!" She turned and was borne away. 
Far out of sight of that place, in a little draw among low hills, they sat and breathed air in searing gasps 
until after a long time it came easy again. 
"Mom, that was stupid," the child said furiously. 
"Sure was," Coyote said. "But did you see all that food!" 
"I'm not hungry," the child said sullenly. "Not till we get all the way away from here." 
"But they're your folks," Coyote said. "All yours. Your kith and kin and cousins and kind. Bang! Pow! 
There's Coyote! Bang! There's my wife's ass! Pow! There's anything� BOOOOM! Blow it away, man! 
BOOOOOOM!" 
"I want to go home," the child said. 
"Not yet," said Coyote. "I got to take a shit." She did so, then turned to the fresh turd, leaning over it. "It 
says I have to stay," she reported, smiling 
"It didn't say anything! I was listening!" 
"You know how to understand? You hear everything Miss Big Ears? Hears all�Sees all with her 
crummy gummy eye�" 
'You have pine-pitch eyes too! You told me so!" 
48 JT BUFFALO GALS 

"That's a story," Coyote snarled. 'You don't even know a story when you hear one! Look, do what you 
like, it's a free country. I'm hanging around here tonight I like the action." She sat down and began 
patting her hands on the dirt in a soft four-four rhythm and singing under her breath, one of the endless 
tuneless songs that kept time from running too fast, that wove the roots of trees and bushes and ferns and 
grass in the web that held the stream in the streambed and the rock in the rock's place and the earth 
together. And the child lay listening. 
"I love you," she said. 
Coyote went on singing. 
Sun went down the last slope of the west and left a pale green clarity over the desert hills. 
Coyote had stopped singing. She sniffed. "Hey," she said. "Dinner." She got up and moseyed along the 
little draw. 'Yeah," she called back softly. "Come on!" 
Stiffly, for the fear-crystals had not yet melted out of her joints, the child got up and went to Coyote. Off 
to one side along the hill was one of the lines, a fence. She didn't look at it It was OK. They were outside 
it 
"Look at that!" 
A smoked salmon, a whole chinook, lay on a little cedar-bark mat "An offering! Well, 111 be darned!" 
Coyote was so impressed she didn't even swear. "I haven't seen one of these for years! I thought they'd 
forgotten!" 
"Offering to who?" 
"Me! Who else? Boy, look at that!" 
The child looked dubiously at the salmon. 
"It smells funny." 
"How funny?" 
"Like burned." 
"It's smoked, stupid! Come on." 
"I'm not hungry." 

"OK. It's not your salmon anyhow. It's mine. My offering, 
Won't You Come Out Tonight ^. 49 
for me. Hey, you people! You people over there! Coyote thanks you! Keep it up like this and maybe 111 
do some good things for you too!" 
"Don't, don't yell, Mom! They're not that far away�" 
"They're all my people," said Coyote with a great gesture, and then sat down cross-legged, broke off a 
big piece of salmon, and ate. 
Evening Star burned like a deep, bright pool of water in the clear sky. Down over the twin hills was a 
dim suffusion of light, like a fog. The child looked away from it, back at the star. 
"Oh," Coyote said. "Oh, shit" 
"What's wrong?" 
"That wasn't so smart, eating that," Coyote said, and then held herself and began to shiver, to scream, to 
choke�her eyes rolled up, her long arms and legs flew out jerking and dancing, foam spurted out 
between her clenched teeth. Her body arched tremendously backwards, and the child, trying to hold her, 
was thrown violently off by the spasms of her limbs. The child scrambled back and held the body as it 
spasmed again, twitched, quivered, went still. 
By moonrise Coyote was cold. Till then there had been so much warmth under the tawny coat that the 
child kept thinking maybe she was alive, maybe if she just kept holding her, keeping her warm, she 
would recover, she would be all right. She held her close, not looking at the black lips drawn back from 
the teeth, the white balls of the eyes. But when the cold came through the fur as the presence of death, 
the child let the slight, stiff corpse lie down on the dirt 
She went nearby and dug a hole in the stony sand of the draw, a shallow pit Coyote's people did not bury 
their dead, she knew that But her people did. She carried the small corpse to the pit, laid it down, and 
covered it with her blue and white bandanna. It was not large enough; the four stiff 
50-^BUFFALO GALS 
paws stuck out The child heaped the body over with sand and rocks and a scurf of sagebrush and 
tumbleweed held down with more rocks. She also went to where the salmon had lain on the cedar mat, 
and finding the carcass of a lamb heaped dirt and rocks over the poisoned thing. Then she stood up and 
walked away without looking back. 
At the top of the hill she stood and looked across the draw toward the misty glow of the lights of the 

town lying in the pass between the twin hills. 
"I hope you all die in pain," she said aloud. She turned away and walked down into the desert 
It was Chickadee who met her, on the second evening north of Horse Butte. 
"I didn't cry," the child said. 
"None of us do," said Chickadee. "Come with me this way now. Come into Grandmother's house." 
It was underground, but very large, dark and large, and the Grandmother was there at the center, at her 
loom. She was making a rug or blanket of the hills and the black rain and the white rain, weaving in the 
lightning. As they spoke she wove. 
"Hello, Chickadee. Hello, New Person." 
"Grandmother," Chickadee greeted her. 
The child said, "I'm not one of them." 
Grandmother's eyes were small and dim. She smiled and wove. The shuttle thrummed through the warp. 
"Old Person, then," said Grandmother. "You'd better go back there now, Granddaughter. That's where 
you live." 
"I lived with Coyote. She's dead. They killed her." 
"Oh, don't worry about Coyote!" Grandmother said, with a little huff of laughter. "She gets killed all the 
time." 
Won't You Come Out Tonight ^.51 
The child stood still. She saw the endless weaving. 
"Then I�Could I go back home�to her house�?" 
"I don't think it would work," Grandmother said. "Do you, Chickadee?" 
Chickadee shook her head once, silent 
"It would be dark there now, and empty, and fleas... You got outside your people's time, into our place; 
but I think that Coyote was taking you back, see. Her way. If you go back now, you can still live with 
them. Isn't your father there?" 

The child nodded. 
"They've been looking for you." 
"They have?" 
"Oh, yes, ever since you fell out of the sky. The man was dead, but you weren't there�they kept 
looking." 
"Serves him right Serves them all right," the child said. She put her hands up over her face and began to 
cry terribly, without tears. 
"Go on, little one, Granddaughter," Spider said. "Don't be afraid. You can live well there. I'll be there 
too, you know. In your dreams, in your ideas, in dark comers in the basement. Don't kill me, or 111 
make it rain..." 
"I'll come around," Chickadee said. "Make gardens for me." 
The child held her breath and clenched her hands until her sobs stopped and let her speak 
"Will I ever see Coyote?" 
"I don't know," the Grandmother replied. 
The child accepted this. She said, after another silence, "Can I keep my eye?" 
"Yes. You can keep your eye." 
"Thank you, Grandmother," the child said. She turned away then and started up the night slope towards 
the next day. Ahead of her in the air of dawn for a long way a little bird flew, black-capped, lightwinged. 
Three Rock Poems 
The first thing about rocks is, they're old. What a geologist calls a "young1 rock may be older than the 
species of the individual who picks it up to look at or throw at something or build with; even a genuinely 
new bit of pumice, fresh from the mouth of Mt. St. Helens, which spat it out into the Columbia River in 
1981 to drift down and be picked up on a beach south of the rivermouth, is potentially (if one may say 
so) old�able to exist in its shapeless, chaotic thingness for time to come beyond human count of years. 
In the wonderful passage in T.H. White's Sword in the Stone where young Arthur the Wart learns to 
understand what the rocks are saying what he hears them whisper is, "Cohere. Cohere." Rocks are in 
time in a different way than living things are, even the ancient trees. So I was thinking when I came to 

the last line of the poem "Flints." But then, the other thing about rocks is that they are place (hence the 
next-to-last line). Rocks are what a place is made of to start with and after all. They are under everything 
else in the world, din, water, street, house, air, launching pad. The stone is at the center. 
The man and woman who survived the Greek Flood were told, "Cast your mother's bones behind you 
and don't look back." When they had figured out what their mother's bones were, they did so; and the 
rocks softened, and took form, and became flesh: our flesh. And this is indeed what happened, between 
the Pre-Cambrian Era and this week: the matter of Earth, rock, softened, took form, opened eyes, stood 
up, stooped down to pick up a rock in soft, warm, momentary fingers... 
55 
56 JT BUFFALO GALS 
The Basalt 
This rock land poured like milk. 
Molten it flowed like honey. 
Volcanoes told it, 
their mouths told all the words of the story, 
continuous, tremendous, coherent, 
brimming over and flowing as easy 
as milk and as certain as darkness. 
You can pick up a word and hold it, 
opaque, 
untranslated. 
Flints 
Color of sun on stone, 
what color, grey or gold? 
In winter Oregon 

on Wiltshire flints in the window 
the same sun. The same stones: 
the standing woman, 
the blind head, 
the leaner, the turner, the stranger. 
Bones of England, single stones 
that mean the world, 
that mean the world is old. 
Wont You Come Out Tonight^ 57 
(1982) 
(1986) 
Mount St Helens/ Omphalos 
O mountain there is no other where you stand the center is 
Seven stones in a circle Robert Spott the shaman set them the child watched him 
There stands the Henge a child plays with toy cars on the Altar Stone 
There stands the mountain alone and there is no other center nor circle's edge 
O stone among the stars the children on the moon saw you 
and came home Earth, hearth, hill, altar, heart's home, the stone is at the center 
(1972) 
"The Wife's Story" and "Mazes" 
"Mazes" is a quite old story, and "The Wife's Story" a more recent one; what they have in common, it 
seems to me, is that they are both betrayals. They are simple but drastic reversals of the conventional, 

the expected. So strong is the sway of the expected that I have learned to explain before I read them to 
an audience that "The Wife's Story" is not about werewolves, and that "Mazes" is not about rats. Perhaps 
what confuses people in "Mazes" is that the character called 'the alien'is from what we call 'the earth,'and 
the other one isn't. The source of the resistance to the reversal in "The Wife's Story" may lie somewhat 
deeper. 
Mazes 
I have tried hard to use my wits and keep up my courage, but I know now that I will not be able to 
withstand the torture any longer. My perceptions of time are confused, but I think it has been several 
days since I realized I could no longer keep my emotions under aesthetic control, and now the physical 
breakdown is also nearly complete. I cannot accomplish any of the greater motions. I cannot speak. 
Breathing in this heavy foreign air, grows more difficult When the paralysis reaches my chest I shall die: 
probably tonight The alien's cruelly is refined, yet irrational. If it intended 
61 
62 JT BUFFALO GALS If 
IP 
all along to starve me, why not simply withhold food? But instead of that it gave me plenty of food, 
mountains of food, all the greenbud leaves I could possibly want Only they were not fresh. They had 
been picked; they were dead; the element that makes them digestible to us was gone, and one might as 
well eat gravel. Yet there they were, with all the scent and shape of greenbud, irresistible to my craving 
appetite. Not at first, of course. I told myself, I am not a child, to eat picked leaves! But the belly gets the 
better of the mind. After a while it seemed better to be chewing something anything that might still the 
pain and craving in the gut So I ate, and ate, and starved. It is a relief, now, to be so weak I cannot eat 
The same elaborately perverse cruelty marks all its behavior. And the worst thing of all is just the one I 
welcomed with such relief and delight at first: the maze. I was badly disoriented at first, after the 
trapping being handled by a giant, being dropped into a prison; and this place around the prison is 
disorienting spatially disquieting the strange, smooth, curved wall-ceiling is of an alien substance and its 
lines are meaningless to me. So when I was taken up and put down, amidst all this strangeness, in a 
maze, a recognizable, even familiar maze, it was a moment of strength and hope after great distress. It 
seemed pretty clear that I had been put in the maze as a kind of test or investigation, that a first approach 
toward communication was being attempted. I tried to cooperate in every way. But it was not possible to 
believe for very long that the creature's purpose was to achieve communication. 
It is intelligent, highly intelligent, that is clear from a thousand evidences. We are both intelligent 
creatures, we are both maze-builders: surely it would be quite easy to leam to talk together! If that were 
what the alien wanted. But it is not I do not know what kind of mazes it builds for itself. The ones it 
made for me were instruments of torture. 

Mazes \~63 
The mazes were, as I said, of basically familiar types, though the walls were of that foreign material 
much colder and smoother than packed clay. The alien left a pile of picked leaves in one extremity of 
each maze, I do not know why; it may be a ritual or superstition. The first maze it put me in was 
babyishly short and simple. Nothing expressive or even interesting could be worked out from it The 
second, however, was a kind of simple version of the Ungated Affirmation, quite adequate for the 
reassuring outreaching statement I wanted to make. And the last, the long maze, with seven corridors 
and nineteen connections, lent itself surprisingly well to the Maluvian mode, and indeed to almost all the 
New Expressionist techniques. Adaptations had to be made to the alien spatial understanding but a 
certain quality of creativity arose precisely from the adaptations. I worked hard at the problem of that 
maze, planning all night long re-imagining the lines and spaces, the feints and pauses, the erratic, 
unfamiliar, and yet beautiful course of the True Run. Next day when I was placed in the long maze and 
the alien began to observe, I performed the Eighth Maluvian in its entirety. 
It was not a polished performance. I was nervous, and the spatio-temporal parameters were only 
approximate. But the Eighth Maluvian survives the crudest performance in the poorest maze. The 
evolutions in the ninth encatena-tion, where the "cloud" theme recurs so strangely transposed into the 
ancient spiraling motif, are indestructibly beautiful. I have seen them performed by a very old person, so 
old and stiff-jointed that he could only suggest the movements, hint at them, a shadow-gesture, a dim 
reflection of the themes: and all who watched were inexpressibly moved. There is no nobler statement of 
our being. Performing I myself was carried away by the power of the motions and forgot that I was a 
prisoner, forgot the alien eyes watching me; I transcended the errors of the maze 
64 JT BUFFALO GALS 
and my own weakness, and danced the Eighth Maluvian as I have never danced it before. 
When it was done, the alien picked me up and set me down in the first maze�the short one, the maze 
for little children who have not yet learned how to talk. 
Was the humiliation deliberate? Now that it is all past, I see that there is no way to know. But it remains 
very hard to ascribe its behavior to ignorance. 
After all, it is not blind. It has eyes, recognizable eyes. They are enough like our eyes that it must see 
somewhat as we do. It has a mouth, four legs, can move bipedally, has grasping hands, etc.; for all its 
gigantism and strange looks, it seems less fundamentally different from us, physically, than a fish. And 
yet, fish school and dance and, in their own stupid way, communicate! The alien has never once 
attempted to talk with me. It has been with me, watched me, touched me, handled me, for days: but all 
its motions have been purposeful, not communicative. It is evidently a solitary creature, totally selfabsorbed. 

This would go far to explain its cruelty. 
I noticed early that from time to time it would move its curious horizontal mouth in a series of fairly 
delicate, repetitive gestures, a little like someone eating. At first I thought it was jeering at me; then I 
wondered if it was trying to urge me to eat the indigestible fodder; then I wondered if it could be 
communicating 1obiaUy. It seemed a limited and unhandy language for one so well provided with 
hands, feet, limbs, flexible spine, and all; but that would be like the creature's perversity, I thought I 
studied its lip-motions and tried hard to imitate them. It did not respond. It stared at me briefly and then 
went away. 
In fact, the only indubitable response I ever got from it was on a pitifully low level of interpersonal 
aesthetics. It was tormenting me with knob-pushing, as it did once a day. I had endured this grotesque 
routine pretty patiently 
Mazes "^-65 
for the first several days. If I pushed one knob I got a nasty sensation in my feet, if I pushed a second I 
got a nasty pellet of dried-up food, if I pushed a third I got nothing whatever. Obviously, to demonstrate 
my intelligence I was to push the third knob. But it appeared that my intelligence irritated my captor, 
because it removed the neutral knob after the second day. I could not imagine what it was trying to 
establish or accomplish, except the fact that I was its prisoner and a great deal smaller than it When I 
tried to leave the knobs, it forced me physically to return. I must sit there pushing knobs for it, receiving 
punishment from one and mockery from the other. The deliberate outrageousness of the situation, the 
insufferable heaviness and thickness of this air, the feeling of being forever watched yet never 
understood, all combined to drive me into a condition for which we have no description at all. The 
nearest thing I can suggest is the last interlude of the Ten Gate Dream, when all the feintways are closed 
and the dance narrows in and in until it bursts terribly into the vertical. I cannot say what I felt, but it 
was a little like that If I got my feet stung once more, or got pelted once more with a lump of rotten food, 
I would go vertical forever... I took the knobs off the wall (they came off with a sharp tug like 
flowerbuds), laid them in the middle of the floor, and defecated on them. 
The alien took me up at once and returned to my prison. It had got the message, and had acted on it But 
how unbelievably primitive the message had had to be! And the next day, it put me back in the knob 
room, and there were the knobs as good as new, and I was to choose alternate punishments for its 
amusement... Until then I had told myself that the creature was alien, therefore incomprehensible and 
uncomprehending, perhaps not intelligent in the same manner as we, and so on. But since then I have 
known that, though all that may remain true, it is also unmistakably and grossly cruel. 
66 JT BUFFALO GALS 
When it put me into the baby maze yesterday, I could not move. The power of speech was all but gone (I 
am dancing this, of course, in my mind; "the best maze is the mind," the old proverb goes) and I simply 
crouched there, silent. After a while it took me out again, gently enough. There is the ultimate perversity 

of its behavior it has never once touched me cruelly. 
It set me down in the prison, locked the gate, and filled up the trough with inedible food. Then it stood 
two-legged, looking at me for a while. 
Its face is very mobile, but if it speaks with its face I cannot understand it, that is too foreign a language. 
And its body is always covered with bulky, binding mats, like an old widower who has taken the Vow of 
Silence. But I had become accustomed to its great size, and to the angular character of its limb-positions, 
which at first had seemed to be saying a steady stream of incoherent and mispronounced phrases, a 
horrible nonsense-dance like the motions of an imbecile, until I realized that they were strictly purposive 
movements. Now I saw something a little beyond that, in its position. There were no words, yet there 
was communication. I saw, as it stood watching me, a clear signification of angry sadness�as clear as 
the Sembrian Stance. There was the same lax immobility, the bentness, the assertion of defeat. Never a 
word came clear, and yet it told me that it was filled with resentment, pity, impatience, and frustration. It 
told me it was sick of torturing me, and wanted me to help it. I am sure I understood it. I tried to answer. 
I tried to say, "What is it you want of me? Only tell me what it is you want." But I was too weak to 
speak clearly, and it did not understand. It has never understood. 
And now I have to die. No doubt it will come in to watch me die; but it will not understand the dance I 
dance in dying. (1971) 
^.67 
The Wife's Story 
HE WAS A GOOD HUSBAND, a good father. I don't understand it I don't believe in it I don't believe 
that it happened. I saw it happen but it isn't true. It can't be. He was always gentle. If you'd have seen 
him playing with the children, anybody who saw him with the children would have known that there 
wasn't any bad in him, not one mean bone. When I first met him he was still living with his mother over 
near Spring Lake, and I used to see them together, the mother and the sons, and think that any young 
fellow that was that nice with his family must be one worth knowing. Then one time when I was 
walking in the woods I met him by himself coming back from a hunting trip. He hadn't got any game at 
all, not so much as a field mouse, but he wasn't cast down about it He was just larking along enjoying 
the morning air. That's one of the things I first loved about him. He didn't take things hard, he didn't 
grouch and whine when things didn't go his way. So we got to talking that day. And I guess things 
moved right along after that, because pretty soon he was over here pretty near all the time. And my sister 
said�see, my parents had moved out the year before and gone South, leaving us the place�my sister 
said, kind of teasing but serious, "Well! If he's going to be here every day and half the night, I guess 
there isn't room for me!" And she moved out�just down the way. We've always been real close, her and 
me. That's the sort of thing doesn't ever change. I couldn't ever have got through this bad time without 
my sis. 
Well, so he came to live here. And all I can say is, it was the happy year of my life. He was just purely 

good to me. A 
68J7 BUFFALO GALS 
hard worker and never lazy, and so big and fine-looking. Everybody looked up to him, you know, young 
as he was. Lodge Meeting nights, more and more often they had him to lead the singing. He had such a 
beautiful voice, and he'd lead off strong and the others following and joining in, high voices and low. It 
brings the shivers on me now to think of it, hearing it, nights when I'd stayed home from meeting when 
the children was babies�the singing coming up through the trees there, and the moonlight, summer 
nights, the full moon shining. Ill never hear anything so beautiful. 111 never know a joy like that again. 
It was the moon, that's what they say. It's the moon's fault, and the blood. It was in his father's blood. I 
never knew his father, and now I wonder what become of him. He was from up Whitewater way, and 
had no kin around here. I always thought he went back there, but now I don't know. There was some talk 
about him, tales, that come out after what happened to my husband. It's something runs in the blood, 
they say, and it may never come out, but if it does, it's the change of the moon that does it Always it 
happens in the dark of the moon. When everybody's home asleep. Something comes over the one that's 
got the curse in his blood, they say, and he gets up because he can't sleep, and goes out into the glaring 
sun, and goes off all alone�drawn to find those like him. And it may be so, because my husband would 
do that I'd half rouse and say, "Where you going to?" and he'd say, "Oh, hunting, be back this evening" 
and it wasn't like him, even his voice was different But I'd be so sleepy, and not wanting to wake the 
kids, and he was so good and responsible, it was no call of mine to go asking "Why?" and "Where?" and 
all like that 
So it happened that way maybe three times or four. He'd come back late, and worn out, and pretty near 
cross for one so sweet-tempered�not wanting to talk about it I figured everybody got to bust out now 
and then, and nagging never 
The Wife's Story ^L 69 
helped anything But it did begin to worry me. No so much that he went, but that he come back so tired 
and strange. Even, he smelled strange. It made my hair stand up on end. I could not endure it and I said, 
"What is that�those smells on you? All over you!" And he said, "I don't know," real short, and made 
like he was sleeping But he went down when he thought I wasn't noticing and washed and washed 
himself. But those smells stayed in his hair, and in our bed, for days. 
And then the awful thing I don't find it easy to tell about this. I want to cry when I have to bring it to my 
mind. Our youngest, the little one, my baby, she turned from her father. Just overnight He come in and 
she got scared-looking stiff, with her eyes wide, and then she begun to cry and try to hide behind me. 
She didn't yet talk plain but she was saying over and over, "Make it go away! Make it go away!" 
The look in his eyes, just for one moment, when he heard that That's what I don't want ever to 
remember. That's what I can't forget The look in his eyes looking at his own child. 

I said to the child, "Shame on you, what's got into you?"�scolding but keeping her right up close to me 
at the same time, because I was frightened too. Frightened to shaking 
He looked away then and said something like, "Guess she just waked up dreaming" and passed it off that 
way. Or tried to. And so did I. And I got real mad with my baby when she kept on acting crazy scared of 
her own dad. But she couldn't help it and I couldn't change it 
He kept away that whole day. Because he knew, I guess. It was just beginning dark of the moon. 
It was hot and close inside, and dark, and we'd all been asleep some while, when something woke me up. 
He wasn't there beside me. I heard a little stir in the passage, 
70 JT BUFFALO GALS 
when I listened. So I got up, because I could bear it no longer. I went out into the passage, and it was 
light there, hard sunlight coming in from the door. And I saw him standing just outside, in the tall grass 
by the entrance. His head was hanging. Presently he sat down, like he felt weary, and looked down at his 
feet I held still, inside, and watched�I didn't know what for. 
And I saw what he saw. I saw the changing. In his feet, it was, first They got long, each foot got longer, 
stretching out, the toes stretching out and the foot getting long, and fleshy, and white. And no hair on 
them. 
The hair begun to come away all over his body. It was like his hair fried away in the sunlight and was 
gone. He was white all over, then, like a worm's skin. And he turned his face. It was changing while I 
looked. It got flatter and flatter, the mouth flat and wide, and the teeth grinning flat and dull, and the 
nose just a knob of flesh with nostril holes, and the ears gone, and the eyes gone blue�blue, with white 
rims around the blue�staring at me out of that flat, soft, white face. 
He stood up then on two legs. 
I saw him, I had to see him, my own dear love, turned into the hateful one. 
I couldn't move, but as I crouched there in the passage staring out into the day I was trembling and 
shaking with a growl that burst out into a crazy, awful howling. A grief howl and a terror howl and a 
calling howl. And the others heard it, even sleeping and woke up. 
It stared and peered, that thing my husband had turned into, and shoved its face up to the entrance of our 
house. I was still bound by mortal fear, but behind me the children had waked up, and the baby was 
whimpering. The mother anger come into me then, and I snarled and crept forward. 
The man thing looked around. It had no gun, like the ones from the man places do. But it picked up a 

heavy 
The Wife's Story ^L 71 
fallen tree-branch in its long white foot, and shoved the end of that down into our house, at me. I 
snapped the end of it in my teeth and started to force my way out, because I knew the man would kill our 
children if it could. But my sister was already coming. I saw her running at the man with her head low 
and her mane high and her eyes yellow as the winter sun. It turned on her and raised up that branch to hit 
her. But I come out of the doorway, mad with the mother anger, and the others all were coming 
answering my call, the whole pack gathering, there in that blind glare and heat of the sun at noon. 
The man looked round at us and yelled out loud, and brandished the branch it held. Then it broke and 
ran, heading for the cleared fields and plowlands, down the mountainside. It ran, on two legs, leaping 
and weaving and we followed it 
I was last, because love still bound the anger and the fear in me. I was running when I saw them pull it 
down. My sister's teeth were in its throat I got there and it was dead. The others were drawing back from 
the kill, because of the taste of the blood, and the smell. The younger ones were cowering and some 
crying and my sister rubbed her mouth against her forelegs over and over to get rid of the taste. I went 
up close because I thought if the thing was dead the spell, the curse must be done, and my husband could 
come back�alive, or even dead, if I could only see him, my true love, in his true form, beautiful. But 
only the dead man lay there white and bloody. We drew back and back from it, and turned and ran, back 
up into the hills, back to the woods of the shadows and the twilight and the blessed dark. 
(1979) 
Five Vegetable Poems 
The first four of these poems have to do with threat and survival, fragility and toughness, what lasts and 
what can't last. I think Westerners may sometimes perceive plants a bit differently from those who grew 
up where water can be taken for granted. In the West, one is often forced to see the plants as quite 
contingent. By now, however, anybody anywhere who can take trees for granted probably also believes 
that the so-called shortage of bison on the Great Plains is a liberal conspiracy. 
The fifth poem, "The Crown of Laurel," is what Adrienne Rich has called a re-visioning. Myths are one 
of our most useful techniques of living ways of telling the world, narrating reality, but in order to be 
useful they must (however archetypal and collectively human their structure) be retold; and the teller 
makes them over�and over. Many women and some men are now engaged in what almost seems a 
shared undertaking of re-telling re-thinking the myths and tales we learned as children�fables, 
folktales, kgends, hero-stories, god-stories. So John Gardner in his brilliant novel Grendel (Beowulf as 
seen by the monsfer), and Anne Sexton's equally brilliant Transformations of folktales; and the work 
goes on, and this poem is part of it. Very often the re-visioning consists in a 'simple' change of point of 
view. It is possible that the very concept of point-of-view may be changing, may have to change, or to 

be changed, so that our reality can be narrated. 
75 
76 JT BUFFALO GALS 
Five Vegetable Poems "^- 77 
Torrey Pines Reserve 
(For Bob and Mary Elliott) 
Ground dry as yellow bones. 
A dust of sand, gold-mica-glittering. 
Oh, dry! Grey ceanothus stems 
twisted and tough; small flowers. A lizard place. 
Rain rare and hard as an old woman's tears 
runnelled these faces of the cliffs. 
Sandstone is softer than the salty wind; 
it crumbles, wrinkles, very old, 
vulnerable. Circles in the rock 
in hollows worn by ocean long ago. 
These are eyes that were his pearls. 
One must walk lightly; this is fragile. Hold to the thread of way. There's narrow place for us in this high 
place between the still desert and the stillness of the sea. This gentle wilderness. 
The Torrey pines 
grow nowhere else on earth. 
Listen: 

you can hear the lizards 
listening. 
Lewis and Clark and After 
Always in the solemn company 
(save on the Desert Hains) 
of those great beings (we did not 
think much about it, trees 
by our tribe being 
seen with the one eye) we 
walked across a forest continent 
Ohone! ohone! the deep groves, the high woods of Ohio! the fir-dark mountains, the silent lives, the 
forests, the forests of Oregon! 
West Texas 
Honor the lives of the terrible places: greasewood, rabbitbrush, prickly pear, yucca, swordfern, 
sagebrush, the dingy wild-eyed sheep alert and deer like shadows starting from the rock. In gait and 
grace and stubborn strength with delicate hoof or filament root, stonebreakers, lifebringers. Let there be 
rain for them. 
(1985) 
(1980) 
(1973) 
78 JJ BUFFALO GALS 
The young fir in the back of the car 
was silent, didn't admire the scenery, 
took up residence without comment 

in the high field near the old apple, 
trading a two-foot pot for the Columbia Gorge. 
When the wind came up, the branches 
said Ssshhh to it, but the trunk and roots 
were taciturn, and will be 
a hundred years from now, perhaps. 
Where the glass bubbles and colored lights 
were, will be rain, and owls. 
It won't hear carols sung again. 
But then, it never listened. 
The Crown of Laurel 
(1982) 
He liked to feel my fingers in his hair. 
So he pulled them off me, wove a wreath of them, 
and wears it at parades and contests, 
my dying fingers with their kitchen smell 
interlocked around his sunny curls. 
Sometimes he rests on me a while. 
Aside from that, he seems to have lost interest 
It wasn't to preserve my Virtue' that I ran! What's a nymph like me to do with something that belongs to 
men? It's just I wasn't in the mood. And he didn't care. It scared me. 
Five Vegetable Poems ^- 79 

The little goadeg boys can't even talk, but still they wait till they can smell you feel like humping with a 
goadeg in the woods, rolling and scratching and laughing�they can laugh!� poor little hairycocks, I 
miss them. 
When we were tired of that kind of thing my sister nymphs and I would lie around, and talk, and tease, 
and stroke, and chase, and stretch out panting for another talk, and sleep in the warm shadows side by 
side under the leaves, and all was as we pleased. 
And then the mortal hunters of the deer, the poachers, the deciduous shepherd-boys: they'd stop and 
gape and stare with owly eyes, not even hoping even when I smiled... New every spring like daffodils, 
those boys. But once for forty years I met one man up on the sheep-cropped hills of Arcady. I kissed his 
wrinkles, the ravines of time I cannot enter, gazing in his eyes, whose dark dimmed and deepened, 
seeing less always, till he died. I came to his burial. Among the villagers I walked behind his grey-haired 
wife. She could have been Time's wife, my grandmother. 
And then there were my brothers of the streams, O my river-lovers, with their silver tongues so sweet to 
thirst! the cool, prolonged delight of a river moving in me, of his flow and flow and flow! 
They send to my roots their kindness, even now, and slowly I drink it from my mother's hands. 
So that was all I knew, until he came, hard, bright, burning dry, intent: one will, instead of wantings 
meeting; no center but himself, the Sun. A god 
80 JT BUFFALO GALS 
is like that, I suppose; he has to be. 
But I never asked to meet a god, 
let alone make love with one! Why did he think 
I wanted to? And when I told him no, 
what harm did he think it did him? 
It can't be hard to find a girl agape 
to love a big blond blue-eyed god. 
He said so, said, "You're all alike." 
He's seen us all; he knows. So, why me? 

I guess that maybe it was time for me to give up going naked, and get dressed. And it took a god to make 
me do it Mother never could. So I put on my brown, ribbed stockings, and my underwear of silky 
cambium, and my green dress. And I became my clothing being what I wear. 
I run no more; the winds dance me. My sister, seamstress, sovereign comes up from the dark below the 
roots to mend my clothes in April. And I stand in my green patience in the winter rains. 
He honors me, he says, to wear my fingers turning brown and brittle, clenched in the bright hair of his 
head. He sings. 
My silence crowns the song. 
(1987) 
V
"The Direction of the Road" and "Vaster Than Empires And More Slow" 
The relation of our species to plant life is one of total dependence and total exploitation�the relation of 
an infant to its mother. Without plants the earth would have remained bare rock and water; without plant 
respiration we'd suffocate promptly; without vegetable food (firsthand or, as in meat, secondhand) we 
starve. There is no other food. 
Deo, Demeter, the grain-mother, and her daughter/self Kore the Maiden called Persephone, raped by the 
Godfather's brother and buried to rise again, are myth-images of this relationship, recognized by 
'primitive'farmers as fundamental. It is still fundamental, but can be completely ignored by a modem city 
dweller whose actual experience of plants is limited to florists' daisies and supermarket beans. The 
ignorance of the urban poor is blameless; the arrogant ignorance of the urban educated, particularly 
those in government, is inexcusable. There is no excuse for deforestation, for acid rain, or for the hunger 
of two-thirds of the children of the earth. 
A very savvy genre, science fiction often acknowledges our plant-dependence�filling a room in the 
spaceship with hydro-panic tanks, or 'terraforming1 the new planet so the colonists can raise grain�but 
with some notable exceptions (such as the film Silent Running), science fiction lacks much real interest 
in whafs green. The absolute passivity of plants, along with their absolute resistance to being replaced 
by an industrial-age substitute (we can have iron horses, steel eagles, mechanical brains, but robot 
wheat? Plastic spinach? If you believe in that 
83 
84 JT BUFFALO GALS 

you must eat the little green hedge on your sushi plate) probably makes them terminally uninteresting to 
the metal-minded and those to whom technology is not a way of living in the world, but a way of 
defeating it. 
All the same, both the stories that follow are quite conventional science fiction. "The Direction of the 
Road" is yet another point-of-view shift, but with the attention focused on Relativity. 'Vaster" is a story 
about boldly going where, etc. In it I was, in part, trying to talk about the obscure fear, called panic, 
which many of us feel when alone in wilderness. I have lost the trail on an Oregon mountain in loggedover 
second-growth forest, where my individual relation to the trees and undergrowth and soil and my 
relative position in their earth-and-ocean-wide realm, as an animal and as a human, were, you might say, 
brought home to me�but then, who's afraid of a goddam tree? We can wipe 'em all out�in a century by 
clearcutting in a generation by pollution, in the twinkling of an eye� 
Direction of the Road 
THEY DID NOT USE TO BE SO DEMANDING. They never hurried us into anything more than a 
gallop, and that was rare; most of the time it was just a jigjog foot-pace. And when one of them was on 
his own feet, it was a real pleasure to approach him. There was time to accomplish the entire act with 
style. There he'd be, working his legs and arms the way they do, usually looking at the road, but often 
aside at the fields, or straight at me: and I'd approach him steadily but quite slowly, growing larger all 
the time, synchronizing the rate of approach and the rate of growth perfectly so that at the very moment 
that I'd finished enlarging from a tiny speck to my full size�sixty 
Direction of the Road ^- 85 
feet in those days�I was abreast of him and hung above him, loomed, towered, overshadowed him. Yet 
he would show no fear. Not even the children were afraid of me, though often they kept their eyes on me 
as I passed by and started to diminish. 
Sometimes on a hot afternoon one of the adults would stop me right there at our meeting-place, and lie 
down with his back against mine for an hour or more. I didn't mind in the least I have an excellent hill, 
good sun, good wind, good view; why should I mind standing still for an hour or an afternoon? It's only 
a relative stillness, after all. One need only look at the sun to realize how fast one is going and then, one 
grows continually�especially in summer. In any case I was touched by the way they would entrust 
themselves to me, letting me lean against their little warm backs, and falling sound asleep there between 
my feet I liked them. They have seldom lent us Grace as do the birds; but I really preferred them to 
squirrels. 
In those days the horses used to work for them, and that too was enjoyable from my point of view. I 
particularly liked the canter, and got quite proficient at it The surging and rhythmical motion 
accompanied shrinking and growing with a swaying and swooping almost an illusion of flight The 
gallop was less pleasant It was jerky, pounding one felt tossed about like a sapling in a gale. And then, 
the slow approach and growth, the moment of looming-over, and the slow retreat and diminishing all 

that was lost during the gallop. One had to hurl oneself into it, cloppety-cloppety-cloppety! and the man 
usually too busy riding and the horse too busy running even to look up. But then, it didn't happen often. 
A horse is mortal, after all, and like all the loose creatures grows tired easily; so they didn't tire their 
horses unless there was urgent need. And they seemed not to have so many urgent needs, in those days. 
It's been a long time since I had a gallop, and to tell the 
86 JT BUFFALO GALS 
truth I shouldn't mind having one. There was something invigorating about it, after all. 
I remember the first motorcar I saw. Like most of us, I took it for a mortal, some kind of loose creature 
new to me. I was a bit startled, for after a hundred and thirty-two years I thought I knew all the local 
fauna. But a new thing is always interesting in its trivial fashion, so I observed this one with attention. I 
approached it at a fair speed, about the rate of a canter, but in a new gait, suitable to the ungainly looks 
of the thing an uncomfortable, bouncing rolling choking jerking gait Within two minutes, before I'd 
grown a foot tall, I knew it was no mortal creature, bound or loose or free. It was a making like the carts 
the horses got hitched to. I thought it so very ill-made that I didn't expect it to return, once it gasped over 
the West Hill, and I heartily hoped it never would, for I disliked that jerking bounce. 
But the thing took to a regular schedule, and so, perforce, did I. Daily at four I had to approach it, 
twitching and stuttering out of the West, and enlarge, loom-over, and diminish. Then at five back I had 
to come, poppeting along like a young jackrabbit for all my sixty feet, jigging and jouncing out of the 
East, until at last I got clear out of sight of the wretched little monster and could relax and loosen my 
limbs to the evening wind. There were always two of them inside the machine: a young male holding the 
wheel, and behind him an old female wrapped in rugs, glowering If they ever said anything to each other 
I never heard it In those days I overheard a good many conversations on the road, but not from that 
machine. The top of it was open, but it made so much noise that it overrode all voices, even the voice of 
the song-sparrow I had with me that year. The noise was almost as vile as the jouncing 
I am of a family of rigid principle and considerable self-respect. The Quercian motto is "Break but bend 
not," and I 
Direction of the Road ^ 87 
have always tried to uphold it It was not only personal vanity, but family pride, you see, that was 
offended when I was forced to jounce and bounce in this fashion by a mere making 
The apple trees in the orchard at the foot of the hfll did not seem to mind; but then, apples are tame. 
Their genes have been tampered with for centuries. Besides, they are herd creatures; no orchard tree can 
really form an opinion of its own. 
I kept my own opinion to myself. 

But I was very pleased when the motorcar ceased to plague us. All month went by without it, and all 
month I walked at men and trotted at horses most willingly, and even bobbed for a baby on its mother's 
arm, trying hard though unsuccessfully to keep in focus. 
Next month, however�September it was, for the swallows had left a few days earlier�another of the 
machines appeared, a new one, suddenly dragging me and the road and our hill, the orchard, the fields, 
the farmhouse roof, all jigging and jouncing and racketing along from East to West; I went faster than a 
gallop, faster than I had ever gone before. I had scarcely time to loom, before I had to shrink right down 
again. 
And the next day there came a different one. 
Yearly then, weekly, daily, they became commoner. They became a major feature of the local Order of 
Things. The road was dug up and re-metalled, widened, finished off very smooth and nasty, like a slug's 
trail, with no ruts, pools, rocks, flowers, or shadows on it There used to be a lot of little loose creatures 
on the road, grasshoppers, ants, toads, mice, foxes, and so on, most of them too small to move for, since 
they couldn't really see one. Now the wise creatures took to avoiding the road, and the unwise ones got 
squashed. I have seen all too many rabbits die in that fashion, right at my feet I am thankful that I am an 
oak, 
88 JT BUFFALO GALS 
and that though I maybe wind-broken or uprooted, hewn or sawn, at least I cannot, under any 
circumstances, be squashed. 
With the presence of many motorcars on the road at once, a new level of skill was required of me. As a 
mere seedling, as soon as I got my head above the weeds, I had learned the basic trick of going two 
directions at once. I learned it without thinking about it, under the simple pressure of circumstances on 
the first occasion that I saw a walker in the East and a horseman facing him in the West I had to go two 
directions at once, and I did so. It's something we trees master without real effort, I suppose. I was 
nervous, but I succeeded in passing the rider and then shrinking away from him while at the same time I 
was still jigjogging towards the walker, and indeed passed him (no looming, back in those days!) only 
when I had got quite out of sight of the rider. I was proud of myself, being very young, that first time I 
did it; but it sounds more difficult than it really is. Since those days of course I had done it innumerable 
times, and thought nothing about it; I could do it in my sleep. But have you ever considered the feat 
accomplished, the skill involved, when a tree enlarges, simultaneously yet at slightly different rates and 
in slightly different manners, for each one of forty motorcar drivers facing two opposite directions, while 
at the same time diminishing for forty more who have got their backs to it, meanwhile remembering to 
loom over each single one at the right moment: and to do this minute after minute, hour after hour, from 
daybreak till nightfall or long after? 
For my road had become a busy one; it worked all day long under almost continual traffic. It worked, 

and I worked. I did not jounce and bounce so much any more, but I had to run faster and faster to grow 
enormously, to loom in a split second, to shrink to nothing, all in a hurry, 
Direction of tine Road "^- 89 
without time to enjoy the action, and without rest over and over and over. 
Very few of the drivers bothered to look at me, not even a seeing glance. They seemed, indeed, not to 
see any more. They merely stared ahead. They seemed to believe that they were "going somewhere." 
Little mirrors were affixed to the front of their cars, at which they glanced to see where they had been; 
then they stared ahead again. I had thought that only beetles had this delusion of Progress. Beetles are 
always rushing about, and never looking up. I had always had a pretty low opinion of beetles. But at 
least they let me be. 
I confess that sometimes, in the blessed nights of darkness with no moon to silver my crown and no stars 
occluding with my branches, when I could rest, I would think seriously of escaping my obligation to the 
general Order of Things: of failing to move. No, not seriously. Half-seriously. It was mere weariness. If 
even a silly, three-year-old, female pussy willow at the foot of the hill accepted her responsibility, and 
jounced and rolled and accelerated and grew and shrank for each motorcar on the road, was I, an oak, to 
shrink? Noblesse oblige, and I trust I have never dropped an acorn that did not know its duty. 
For fifty or sixty years, then, I have upheld the Order of Things, and have done my share in supporting 
the human creatures' illusion that they are "going somewhere." And I am not unwilling to do so. But a 
truly terrible thing has occurred, which I wish to protest 
I do not mind going two directions at once; I do not mind growing and shrinking simultaneously; I do 
not mind moving even at the disagreeable rate of sixty or seventy miles an hour. I am ready to go on 
doing all these things until I am felled or bulldozed. They're my job. But I do object, passionately, to 
being made eternal. 
90 JT BUFFALO GALS 
Eternity is none of my business. I am an oak, no more, no less. I have my duty, and I do it; I have my 
pleasures, and enjoy them, though they are fewer, since the birds are fewer, and the wind's foul. But, 
long-lived though I maybe, impermanence is my right Mortality is my privilege. And it has been taken 
from me. 
It was taken from me on a rainy evening in March last year. 
Fits and bursts of cars, as usual, filled the rapidly moving road in both directions. I was so busy hurtling 
along, enlarging, looming diminishing and the light was failing so fast, that I scarcely noticed what was 
happening until it happened. One of the drivers of one of the cars evidently felt that his need to "go 
somewhere" was exceptionally urgent, and so attempted to place his car in front of the car in front of it 

This maneuver involves a temporary slanting of the Direction of the Road and a displacement onto the 
far side, the side which normally runs the other direction (and may I say that I admire the road very 
highly for its skill in executing such maneuvers, which must be difficult for an unliving creature, a mere 
making). Another car, however, happened to be quite near the urgent one, and facing it, as it changed 
sides; and the road could not do anything about it, being already overcrowded. To avoid impact with the 
facing car, the urgent car totally violated the Direction of the Road, swinging it round to North-South in 
its own terms, and so forcing me to leap directly at it I had no choice. I had to move, and move fast� 
eighty-five miles an hour. I leapt: I loomed enormous, larger than I have ever loomed before. And then I 
hit the car. 
I lost a considerable piece of bark, and, what's more serious, a fair bit of cambium layer; but as I was 
seventy-two feet tall and about nine feet in girth at the point of impact, no real harm was done. My 
branches trembled with the shock enough that a last-year's robin's nest was 
Direction of the Road ^.91 
dislodged and fell; and I was so shaken that I groaned. It is the only time in my life that I have ever said 
anything out loud. 
The motorcar screamed horribly. It was smashed by my blow, squashed, in fact Its hinder parts were not 
much affected, but the forequarters knotted up and knurled together like an old root, and little bright bits 
of it flew all about and lay like brittle rain. 
The driver had no time to say anything; I killed him instantly. 
It is not this that I protest I had to kill him. I had no choice, and therefore have no regret What I protest, 
what I cannot endure, is this: as I leapt at him, he saw me. He looked up at last He saw me as I have 
never been seen before, not even by a child, not even in the days when people looked at things. He saw 
me whole, and saw nothing else� then, or ever. 
He saw me under the aspect of eternity. He confused me with eternity. And because he died in that 
moment of false vision, because it can never change, I am caught in it, eternally. 
This is unendurable. I cannot uphold such an illusion. If the human creatures will not understand 
Relativity, very well; but they must understand Relatedness. 
If it is necessary to the Order of Things, I will kill drivers of cars, though killing is not a duty usually 
required of oaks. But it is unjust to require me to play the part, not of the killer only, but of death. For I 
am not death. I am life: I am mortal. 
If they wish to see death visibly in the world, that is their business, not mine. I will not act Eternity for 
them. Let them not turn to the trees for death. If that is what they want to see, let them look into one 
another's eyes and see it there. 

(1974) 
92 JT 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow 
IT WAS ONLY DURING THE EARLIEST DECADES of the League that the Earth sent ships out on 
the enormously long voyages, beyond the pale, over the stars and far away. They were seeking for 
worlds which had not been seeded or settled by the Founders on Hain, truly alien worlds. All the Known 
Worlds went back to the Hainish Origin, and the Terrans, having been not only founded but salvaged by 
the Hainish, resented this. They wanted to get away from the family. They wanted to find somebody 
new. The Hainish, like tiresomely understanding parents, supported their explorations, and contributed 
ships and volunteers, as did several other worlds of the League. 
All these volunteers to the Extreme Survey crews shared one peculiarity: they were of unsound mind. 
What sane person, after all, would go out to collect information that would not be received for five or ten 
centuries? Cosmic mass interference had not yet been eliminated from the operation of the ansible, and 
so instantaneous communication was reliable only within a range of 120 lightyears. The explorers would 
be quite isolated. And of course they had no idea what they might come back to, if they came back. No 
normal human being who had experienced time-slippage of even a few decades between League worlds 
would volunteer for a round trip of centuries. The Surveyors were escapists, misfits. They were nuts. 
Ten of them climbed aboard the ferry at Smeming Port, and made varyingly inept attempts to get to 
know one another during the three days the ferry took getting to their 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow ^. 93 
ship, Gum. Gum is a Cetian nickname, on the order of Baby or Pet. There were two Cetians on the team, 
two Hainishmen, one Beldene, and five Terrans; the Cetian-built ship was chartered by the Government 
of Earth. Her motley crew came aboard wriggling through the coupling tube one by one like 
apprehensive spermatozoa trying to fertilize the universe. The ferry left, and the navigator put Gum 
underway. She flitted for some hours on the edge of space a few hundred million miles from Smeming 
Port, and then abruptly vanished. 
When, after 10 hours 29 minutes, or 256 years, Gum reappeared in normal space, she was supposed to 
be in the vicinity of Star KG-E-96651. Sure enough, there was the gold pinhead of the star. Somewhere 
within a four-hundred-million-kilometer sphere there was also a greenish planet, World 4470, as charted 
by a Cetian mapmaker. The ship now had to find the planet. This was not quite so easy as it might 
sound, given a four-hundred-million-kilometer haystack. And Gum couldn't bat about in planetary space 
at near lightspeed; if she did, she and Star KG-E-96651 and World 4470 might all end up going bang 
She had to creep, using rocket propulsion, at a few hundred thousand miles an hour. The Mathematician/ 

Navigator, Asnanifoil, knew pretty well where the planet ought to be, and thought they might raise it 
within ten E-days. Meanwhile the members of the Survey team got to know one another still better. 
"I can't stand him," said Porlock, the Hard Scientist (chemistry, plus physics, astronomy, geology, etc.), 
and little blobs of spittle appeared on his mustache. "The man is insane. I can't imagine why he was 
passed as fit to join a Survey team, unless this is a deliberate experiment in non-compatibility, planned 
by the Authority, with us as guinea pigs." 
"We generally use hamsters and Hainish gholes," said Mannon, the Soft Scientist (psychology, plus 
psychiatry, 
94 JT BUFFALO GALS 
anthropology, ecology, etc.), politely; he was one of the Hainishmen. "Instead of guinea pigs. Well, you 
know, Mr. Osden is really a very rare case. In fact, he's the first fully cured case of Render's Syndrome� 
a variety of infantile autism which was thought to be incurable. The great Ter-ran analyst Hammergeld 
reasoned that the cause of the autistic condition in this case is a supernormal empathic capacity, and 
developed an appropriate treatment Mr. Osden is the first patient to undergo that treatment, in fact he 
lived with Dr. Hammergeld until he was eighteen. The therapy was completely successful." 
"Successful?" 
"Why, yes. He certainly is not autistic." 
"No, he's intolerable!" 
"Well, you see," said Mannon, gazing mildly at the saliva-flecks on Porlock's mustache, "the normal 
defensive-aggressive reaction between strangers meeting�let's say you and Mr. Osden just for example 
�is something you're scarcely aware of; habit, manners, inattention get you past it; you Ve learned to 
ignore it, to the point where you might even deny it exists. However, Mr. Osden, being an empath, feels 
it Feels his feelings, and yours, and is hard put to say which is which. Let's say that there's a normal 
element of hostility towards any stranger in your emotional reaction to him when you meet him, plus a 
spontaneous dislike of his looks, or clothes, or handshake�it doesn't matter what He feels that dislike. 
As his autistic defense has been unlearned, he resorts to an aggressive-defense mechanism, a response in 
kind to the aggression which you have unwittingly projected onto him." Mannon went on for quite a 
long time. 
"Nothing gives a man the right to be such a bastard," Porlock said. 
"He can't tune us out?" asked Harfex, the Biologist, another Hainishman. 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow "^- 95 

"It's like hearing" said Olleroo, Assistant Hard Scientist, stopping over to paint her toenails with 
fluorescent lacquer. "No eyelids on your ears. No Off switch on empathy. He hears our feelings whether 
he wants to or not" 
"Does he know what we're thinking?" asked Eskwana, the Engineer, looking round at the others in real 
dread. 
"No," Porlock snapped. "Empathy's not telepathy! Nobody's got telepathy." 
"Yet," said Mannon, with his little smile. "Just before I left Hain there was a most interesting report in 
from one of the recently discovered worlds, a hilfer named Rocannon reporting what appears to be a 
teachable telepathic technique existent among a mutated hominid race; I only saw a synopsis in the 
HILF Bulletin, but�" He went on. The others had learned that they could talk while Mannon went on 
talking he did not seem to mind, nor even to miss much of what they said. 
"Then why does he hate us?" Eskwana said. 
"Nobody hates you, Ander honey," said Olleroo, daubing Eskwana's left thumbnail with fluorescent 
pink. The engineer flushed and smiled vaguely. 
"He acts as if he hated us," said Haito, the Coordinator. She was a delicate-looking woman of pure Asian 
descent, with a surprising voice, husky, deep, and soft, like a young bullfrog "Why, if he suffers from 
our hostility, does he increase it by constant attacks and insults? I can't say I think much of Dr. 
Hammergeld's cure, really, Mannon; autism might be preferable..." 
She stopped. Osden had come into the main cabin. 
He looked flayed. His skin was unnaturally white and thin, showing the channels of his blood like a 
faded road map in red and blue. His Adam's apple, the muscles that circled his mouth, the bones and 
ligaments of his wrists and hands, all stood out distinctly as if displayed for an anatomy lesson. His hair 
was pale rust, like long-dried 
96 JT BUFFALO GALS 
blood. He had eyebrows and lashes, but they were visible only in certain lights; what one saw was the 
bones of the eye sockets, the veining of the lids, and the colorless eyes. They were not red eyes, for he 
was not really an albino, but they were not blue or grey; colors had canceled out in Osden's eyes, leaving 
a cold water-like clarity, infinitely penetrable. He never looked directly at one. His face lacked 
expression, like an anatomical drawing or a skinned face. 
"I agree," he said in a high, harsh tenor, "that even autistic withdrawal might be preferable to the smog 
of cheap secondhand emotions with which you people surround me. What are you sweating hate for 
now, Porlock? Can't stand the sight of me? Go practice some auto-eroticism the way you were doing last 

night, it improves your vibes. Who the devil moved my tapes, here? Don't touch my things, any of you. I 
won't have it" 
"Osden," said Asnanifoil in his large slow voice, "why are you such a bastard?" 
Ander Eskwana cowered and put his hands in front of his face. Contention frightened him. Olleroo 
looked up with a vacant yet eager expression, the eternal spectator. 
"Why shouldn't I be?" said Osden. He was not looking at Asnanifoil, and was keeping physically as far 
away from all of them as he could in the crowded cabin. "None of you constitute, in yourselves, any 
reason for my changing my behavior." 
Harfex, a reserved and patient man, said, "The reason is that we shall be spending several years together. 
Life will be better for all of us if�" 
"Can't you understand that I don't give a damn for all of you?" Osden said, took up his microtapes, and 
went out Eskwana had suddenly gone to sleep. Asnanifoil was drawing slipstreams in the air with his 
finger and muttering the Ritual Primes. "You cannot explain his presence on the team except as a plot on 
the part of the Terran Authority. I 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow ^~ 97 
saw this almost at once. This mission is meant to fail," Harfex whispered to the Coordinator, glancing 
over his shoulder. Porlock was fumbling with his fly-button; there were tears in his eyes. I did tell you 
they were all crazy, but you thought I was exaggerating. 
All the same, they were not unjustified. Extreme Surveyors expected to find their fellow team members 
intelligent, well-trained, unstable, and personally sympathetic. They had to work together in close 
quarters and nasty places, and could expect one another's paranoias, depressions, manias, phobias and 
compulsions to be mild enough to admit of good personal relationships, at least most of the time. Osden 
might be intelligent, but his training was sketchy and his personality was disastrous. He had been sent 
only on account of his singular gift, the power of empathy: properly speaking, of wide-range 
bioempathic receptivity. His talent wasn't species-specific; he could pick up emotion or sentience from 
anything that felt He could share lust with a white rat, pain with a squashed cockroach, and phototropy 
with a moth. On an alien world, the Authority had decided, it would be useful to know if anything 
nearby is sentient, and if so, what its feelings towards you are. Osden's title was a new one: he was the 
team's Sensor. 
"What is emotion, Osden?" Haito Tomiko asked him one day in the main cabin, trying to make some 
rapport with him for once. "What is it, exactly, that you pick up with your empathic sensitivity?" 
"Muck," the man answered in his high, exasperated voice. "The psychic excreta of the animal kingdom. 
I wade through your feces." 

"I was trying," she said, "to learn some facts." She thought her tone was admirably calm. 
"You weren't after facts. You were trying to get at me. With some fear, some curiosity, and a great deal 
of distaste. The way you might poke a dead dog to see the maggots 
98-^BUFFALO GALS 
crawl. Will you understand once and for all that I don't want to be got at, that I want to be left alone?" 
His skin was mottled with red and violet, his voice had risen. "Go roll in your own dung you yellow 
bitch!" he shouted at her silence. 
"Calm down," she said, still quietly, but she left him at once and went to her cabin. Of course he had 
been right about her motives; her question had been largely a pretext, a mere effort to interest him. But 
what harm in that? Did not that effort imply respect for the other? At the moment of asking the question 
she had felt at most a slight distrust of him; she had mostly felt sorry for him, the poor arrogant 
venomous bastard, Mr. No-Skin as Olleroo called him. What did he expect, the way he acted? Love? 
"I guess he can't stand anybody feeling sorry for him," said Olleroo, lying on the lower bunk, gilding her 
nipples. 
"Then he can't form any human relationship. All his Dr. Hammergeld did was turn an autism inside 
out..." 
"Poor frot," said Olleroo. "Tomiko, you don't mind if Harfex comes in for a while tonight, do you?" 
"Can't you go to his cabin? I'm sick of always having to sit in Main with that damned peeled turnip." 
"You do hate him, don't you? I guess he feels that But I slept with Harfex last night too, and Asnanifoil 
might get jealous, since they share the cabin. It would be nicer here." 
"Service them both," Tomiko said with the coarseness of offended modesty. Her Terran subculture, the 
East Asian, was a puritanical one; she had been brought up chaste. 
"I only like one a night," Olleroo replied with innocent serenity. Beldene, the Garden Planet, had never 
discovered chastity, or the wheel. 
"Try Osden, then," Tomiko said. Her personal instability was seldom so plain as now: a profound selfdistrust 
manifesting itself as destructivism. She had volunteered for this job because there was, in all 
probability, no use in doing it 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow *^L 99 

The little Beldene looked up, paintbrush in hand, eyes wide. 'Tomiko, that was a dirty thing to say." 
"Why?" 
"It would be vile! I'm not attracted to Osden!" 
"I didn't know it mattered to you," Tomiko said indifferently, though she did know. She got some papers 
together and left the cabin, remarking "I hope you and Harfex or whoever it is finish by last bell; I'm 
tired." 
Olleroo was crying tears dripping on her little gilded nipples. She wept easily. Tomiko had not wept 
since she was ten years old. 
It was not a happy ship; but it took a turn for the better when Asnanifoil and his computers raised World 
4470. There it lay, a dark-green jewel, like truth at the bottom of a gravity well. As they watched the 
jade disc grow, a sense of mutuality grew among them. Osden's selfishness, his accurate cruelty, served 
now to draw the others together. "Perhaps," Mannon said, "he was sent as a beating-gron. What Terrans 
call a scapegoat Perhaps his influence will be good after all." And no one, so careful were they to be 
kind to one another, disagreed. 
They came into orbit There were no lights on nightside, on the continents none of the lines and clots 
made by animals who build. 
"No men," Harfex murmured. 
"Of course not," snapped Osden, who had a viewscreen to himself, and his head inside a polythene bag 
He claimed that the plastic cut down on the empathic noise he received from the others. "We're two light 
centuries past the limit of the Hanish Expansion, and outside that there are no men. Anywhere. You 
don't think Creation would have made the same hideous mistake twice?" 
No one was paying him much heed; they were looking with affection at that jade immensity below them, 
where there was life, but not human life. They were misfits 
100 JT BUFFALO GALS 
among men, and what they saw there was not desolation, but peace. Even Osden did not look quite so 
expressionless as usual; he was frowning 
Descent in fire on the sea; air reconnaissance; landing. A plain of something like grass, thick, green, 
bowing stalks, surrounded the ship, brushed against extended view cameras, smeared the lenses with a 
fine pollen. 
"It looks like a pure phytosphere," Harfex said. "Osden, do you pick up anything sentient?" 

They all turned to the Sensor. He had left the screen and was pouring himself a cup of tea. He did not 
answer. He seldom answered spoken questions. 
The chitinous rigidity of military discipline was quite inapplicable to these teams of mad scientists; their 
chain of command lay somewhere between parliamentary procedure and peck-order, and would have 
driven a regular service officer out of his mind. By the inscrutable decision of the Authority, however, 
Dr. Haito Tomiko had been given the title of Coordinator, and she now exercised her prerogative for the 
first time. "Mr. Sensor Osden," she said, "please answer Mr. Harfex." 
"How could I 'pick up' anything from outside," Osden said without turning, "with the emotions of nine 
neurotic hominids pulsating around me like worms in a can? When I have anything to tell you, 111 tell 
you. I'm aware of my responsibility as Sensor. If you presume to give me an order again, however, 
Coordinator Haito, 111 consider my responsibility void." 
"Very well, Mr. Sensor. I trust no orders will be needed henceforth." Tomiko's bullfrog voice was calm, 
but Osden seemed to flinch slightly as he stood with his back to her, as if the surge of her suppressed 
rancor had struck him with physical force. 
The biologist's hunch proved correct When they began field analyses they found no animals even among 
the 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow "^-101 
microbiota. Nobody here ate anybody else. All life-forms were photosynthesizing or saprophagous, 
living offlight or death, not off life. Plants: infinite plants, not one species known to the visitors from the 
house of Man. Infinite shades and intensities of green, violet, purple, brown, red. Infinite silences. Only 
the wind moved, swaying leaves and fronds, a warm soughing wind laden with spores and pollens, 
blowing the sweet pale-green dust over prairies of great grasses, heaths that bore no heather, flowerless 
forests where no foot had ever walked, no eye had ever looked. A warm, sad world, sad and serene, the 
Surveyors wandering like picknickers over sunny plains of violet filicaliformes, spoke softly to each 
other. They knew their voices broke a silence of a thousand million years, the silence of wind and 
leaves, leaves and wind, blowing and ceasing and blowing again. They talked softly; but being human, 
they talked. 
"Poor old Osden," said Jenny Chong Bio and Tech, as she piloted a helijet on the North Polar 
Quadrating run. "All that fancy hi-fi stuff in his brain and nothing to receive. What a bust" 
"He told me he hates plants," Olleroo said with a giggle. 
"You'd think he'd like them, since they don't bother him like we do." 
"Can't say I much like these plants myself," said Porlock, looking down at the purple undulations of the 

North Cir-cumpolar Forest "All the same. No mind. No change. A man alone in it would go right off his 
head." 
"But it's all alive," Jenny Chong said. "And if it lives, Osden hates it" 
"He's not really so bad," Olleroo said, magnanimous. 
Porlock looked at her sidelong and asked, "You ever slept with him, Olleroo?" Olleroo burst into tears 
and cried, "You Terrans are obscene!" 
"No she hasn't," Jenny Chong said, prompt to defend. "Have you, Porlock?" 
102 JcT BUFFALO GALS 
The chemist laughed uneasily: ha, ha, ha Flecks of spittle appeared on his mustache. 
"Osden can't bear to be touched," Olleroo said shakily. "I just brushed against him once by accident and 
he knocked me off like I was some sort of dirty... thing. We're all just things, to him," 
"He's evil," Porlock said in a strained voice, startling the two women. "Hell end up shattering this team, 
sabotaging it, one way or another. Mark my words. He's not fit to live with other people!" They landed 
on the North Pole. A midnight sun smoldered over low hills. Short, dry, greenish-pink bryoform grasses 
stretched away in every direction, which was all one direction, south. Subdued by the incredible silence, 
the three Surveyors set up their instruments and set to work, three viruses twitching minutely on the hide 
of an unmoving giant 
Nobody asked Osden along on runs as pilot or photographer or recorder, and he never volunteered, so he 
seldom left base camp. He ran Harfex's botanical taxonomic data through the onship computers, and 
served as assistant to Eskwana, whose job here was mainly repair and maintenance. Eskwana had begun 
to sleep a great deal, twenty-five hours or more out of the thirty-two-hour day, dropping off in the 
middle of repairing a radio or checking the guidance circuits of a helijet The Coordinator stayed at base 
one day to observe. No one else was home except Poswet To, who was subject to epileptic fits; Mannon 
had plugged her into a therapy-circuit today in a state of preventive catatonia. Tomiko spoke reports into 
the storage banks, and kept an eye on Osden and Eskwana. Two hours passed. 
"You might want to use the 860 microwaldoes in sealing that connection," Eskwana said in his soft, 
hesitant voice. 
"Obviously!" 
"Sorry. I just saw you had the 840's there�" 
"And will replace them when I take the 860's out. When I 

Vaster Than Empires and More Slow ^-103 
don't know how to proceed, Engineer, 111 ask your advice." 
After a minute Tomiko looked round. Sure enough, there was Eskwana sound asleep, head on the table, 
thumb in his mouth. "Osden." 
The white face did not turn, he did not speak, but conveyed impatiently that he was listening. 
'You can't be unaware of Eskwana's vulnerability." 
"I am not responsible for his psychopathic reactions." 
"But you are responsible for your own. Eskwana is essential to our work here, and you're not If you can't 
control your hostility, you must avoid him altogether." 
Osden put down his tools and stood up. "With pleasure!" he said in his vindictive, scraping voice. "You 
could not possibly imagine what it's like to experience Eskwana's irrational terrors. To have to share his 
horrible cowardice, to have to cringe with him at everything!" 
"Are you trying to justify your cruelty towards him? I thought you had more self-respect" Tomiko found 
herself shaking with spite. "If your empathic power really makes you share Ander's misery, why does it 
never induce the least compassion in you?" 
"Compassion," Osden said. "Compassion. What do you know about compassion?" 
She stared at him, but he would not look at her. 
"Would you like me to verbalize your present emotional affect regarding myself?" he said. "I can do 
more precisely than you can. I'm trained to analyze such responses as I receive them. And I do receive 
them." 
"But how can you expect me to feel kindly towards you when you behave as you do?" 
"What does it matter how I behave, you stupid sow, do you mink it makes any difference? Do you think 
the average human is a well of loving-kindness? My choice is to be hated or to be despised. Not being a 
woman or a coward, I prefer to be hated." 
104 JT BUFFALO GALS 
"That's rot Self-pity. Every man has�" 

"But I am not a man," Osden said. "There are all of you. And there is myself. I am one." 
Awed by that glimpse of abysmal solipsism, she kept silent a while; finally she said with neither spite 
nor pity, clinically, 'You could kill yourself, Osden." 
"That's your way, Haito," he jeered. "I'm not depressive, and seppuku isn't my bit. What do you want me 
to do here?" 
"Leave. Spare yourself and us. Take the aircarand a data-feeder and go do a species count In the forest; 
Harfex hasn't even started the forests yet Take a hundred-square-meter forested area, anywhere inside 
radio range. But outside empathy range. Report in at 8 and 24 o'clock daily." 
Osden went, and nothing was heard from him for five days but laconic all-well signals twice daily. The 
mood at base camp changed like a stage-set Eskwana stayed awake up to eighteen hours a day. Poswet 
To got her stellar lute and chanted the celestial harmonies (music had driven Osden into a frenzy). 
Mannon, Harfex, Jenny Chong and Tomiko all went off tranquilizers. Porlock distilled some-tiling in his 
laboratory and drank it all by himself. He had a hangover. Asnanifoil and Poswet To held an all-night 
Numerical Epiphany, that mystical orgy of higher mathematics which is the chief pleasure of the 
religious Cetian soul. Olleroo slept with everybody. Work went well. 
The Hard Scientist came towards base at a run, laboring through the high, fleshy stalks of the 
graminiformes. "Something�in the forest�" His eyes bulged, he panted, his mustache and fingers 
trembled. "Something big. Moving behind me. I was putting in a benchmark, bending down. It came at 
me. As if it was swinging down out of the trees. Behind me." He stared at the others with the opaque 
eyes of terror or exhaustion. 
"Sit down, Porlock. Take it easy. Now wait, go through this again. You sou' something�" 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow ^-105 
"Not clearly. Just the movement Purposive. A�an�I don't know what it could have been. Something 
self-moving In the trees, the arboriformes, whatever you call 'em. At the edge of the woods." 
Harfex looked grim. "There is nothing here that could attack you, Porlock There are not even microzoa. 
There could not be a large animal." 
"Could you possible have seen an epiphyte drop suddenly, a vine come loose behind you?" 
"No," Porlock said. "It was coming down at me, through the branches. When I turned it took off again, 
away and upward. It made a noise, a sort of crashing If it wasn't an animal, God knows what it could 
have been! It was big� as big as a man, at least Maybe a reddish color. I couldn't see, I'm not sure." 
"It was Osden," said Jenny Chong "doing a Tarzan act" She giggled nervously, and Tomiko repressed a 

wild feckless laugh. But Harfex was not smiling 
"One gets uneasy under the arboriformes," he said in his polite, repressed voice. "IVe noticed that 
Indeed that may be why I've put off working in the forests. There's a hypnotic quality in the colors and 
spacing of the stems and branches, especially the helically-arranged ones; and the spore-throwers grow 
so regularly spaced that it seems unnatural. I find it quite disagreeable, subjectively speaking I wonder if 
a stronger effect of that sort mightn't have produced a hallucination...?" 
Porlock shook his head. He wet his lips. "It was there," he said. "Something Moving with purpose. 
Trying to attack me from behind." 
When Osden called in, punctual as always, at 24 o'clock that night, Harfex told him Porlock's report 
"Have you come on anything at all, Mr. Osden, that could substantiate Mr. Porlock's impression of a 
motile, sentient life-form, in the forest?" 
106^BUFFALO GALS 
Ssss, the radio said sardonically. "No. Bullshit," said Osden's unpleasant voice. 
"You've been actually inside the forest longer than any of us," Harfex said with unmitigable politeness. 
"Do you agree with my impression that the forest ambiance has a rather troubling and possibly 
hallucinogenic effect on the perceptions?" 
Ssss. "I'll agree that Porlock's perceptions are easily troubled. Keep him in his lab, he'll do less harm. 
Anything else?" 
"Not at present," Harfex said, and Osden cut off. 
Nobody could credit Porlock's story, and nobody could discredit it He was positive that something 
something big had tried to attack him by surprise. It was hard to deny this, for they were on an alien 
world, and everyone who had entered the forest had felt a certain chill and foreboding under the 
"trees." ("Call them trees, certainly," Harfex had said. "They really are the same thing only, of course, 
altogether different") They agreed that they had felt uneasy, or had had the sense that something was 
watching them from behind. 
"We've got to clear this up," Porlock said, and he asked to be sent as a temporary Biologist's Aide, like 
Osden, into the forest to explore and observe. Olleroo and Jenny Chong volunteered if they could go as a 
pair. Harfex sent them all off into the forest near which they were encamped, a vast tract covering fourfifths 
of Continent D. He forbade side-arms. They were not to go outside a fifty-mile half-circle, which 
included Osden's current site. They all reported in twice daily, for three days. Porlock reported a glimpse 
of what seemed to be a large semi-erect shape moving through the trees across the river; Olleroo was 
sure she had heard something moving near the tent, the second night 

"There are no animals on this planet," Harfex said, 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow ^-107 
Then Osden missed his morning call. 
Tomiko waited less than an hour, then flew with Harfex to the area where Osden had reported himself 
the night before. But as the helijet hovered over the sea of purplish leaves, illimitable, impenetrable, she 
felt a panic despair. "How can we find him in this?" 
"He reported landing on the riverbank. Find the aircar; he'll be camped near it, and he can't have gone far 
from his camp. Species-counting is slow work. There's the river." 
"There's his car," Tomiko said, catching the bright foreign glint among the vegetable colors and 
shadows. "Here goes, then." 
She put the ship in hover and pitched out the ladder. She and Harfex descended. The sea of life closed 
over their heads. 
As her feet touched the forest floor, she unsnapped the flap of her holster; then glancing at Harfex, who 
was unarmed, she left the gun untouched. But her hand kept coming back to it. There was no sound at 
all, as soon as they were a few meters away from the slow, brown river, and the light was dim. Great 
boles stood well apart, almost regularly, almost alike; they were soft-skinned, some appearing smooth 
and others spongy, grey or greenish-brown or brown, twined with cable-like creepers and festooned with 
epiphytes, extending rigid, entangled armfuls of big saucer-shaped, dark leaves that formed a roof-layer 
twenty to thirty meters thick. The ground underfoot was springy as a mattress, every inch of it knotted 
with roots and peppered with small, fleshy-leafed growths. 
"Here's his tent," Tomiko said, cowed at the sound of her voice in that huge community of the voiceless. 
In the tent was Osden's sleeping bag, a couple of books, a box of rations. We should be calling shouting 
for him, she thought, but did not even suggest it; nor did Harfex They circled out from the tent, careful 
to keep each other in 
108 JT BUFFALO GALS 
sight through the thick-standing presences, the crowding gloom. She stumbled over Osden's body, not 
thirty meters from the tent, led to it by the whitish gleam of a dropped notebook. He lay face down 
between two huge-rooted trees. His head and hands were covered with blood, some dried, some still 
oozing red. 
Harfex appeared beside her, his pale Hainish complexion quite green in the dusk. "Dead?" 
"No. He's been struck. Beaten. From behind." Tomiko's fingers felt over the bloody skull and temples 

and nape. "A weapon or a tool... I don't find a fracture." 
As she turned Osden's body over so they could lift him, his eyes opened. She was holding him, bending 
close to his face. His pale lips writhed. A deathly fear came into her. She screamed aloud two or three 
times and tried to run away, shambling and stumbling into the terrible dusk. Harfex caught her, and at 
his touch and the sound of his voice, her panic decreased. "What is it? What is it?" he was saying 
"I don't know," she sobbed. Her heartbeat still shook her, and she could not see clearly. "The fear�the... 
I panicked. When I saw his eyes." 
"We're both nervous. I don't understand this�" 
"I'm all right now, come on, we've got to get him under care." 
Both working with senseless haste, they lugged Osden to the riverside and hauled him up on a rope 
under his armpits; he dangled like a sack, twisting a little, over the glutinous dark sea of leaves. They 
pulled him into the helijet and took off. Within a minute they were over open prairie. Tomiko locked 
onto the homing beam. She drew a deep breath, and her eyes met Harfex's. "I was so terrified I almost 
fainted. I have never done that" 
"I was... unreasonably frightened also," said the Hain-ishman, and indeed he looked aged and shaken. 
"Not so badly as you. But as unreasonably." 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow "^-109 
"It was when I was in contact with him, holding him. He seemed to be conscious for a moment" 
"Empathy?... I hope he can tell us what attacked him." 
Osden, like a broken dummy covered with blood and mud, half lay as they had bundled him into the rear 
seats in their frantic urgency to get out of the forest 
More panic met their arrival at base. The ineffective brutality of the assault was sinister and bewildering. 
Since Harfex stubbornly denied any possibility of animal life they began speculating about sentient 
plants, vegetable monsters, psychic projections. Jenny Chong's latent phobia reasserted itself and she 
could talk about nothing except the Dark Egos which followed people around behind their backs. She 
and Olleroo and Porlock had been summoned back to base; and nobody was much inclined to go outside. 
Osden had lost a good deal of blood during the three or four hours he had lain alone, and concussion and 
severe contusions had put him in shock and semi-coma. As he came out of this and began running a low 
fever he called several times for "Doctor," in a plaintive voice: "Doctor Hammergeld..." When he 
regained full consciousness, two of those long days later, Tomiko called Harfex into his cubicle. 

"Osden: can you tell us what attacked you?" 
The pale eyes flickered past Harfex's face. 
"You were attacked," Tomiko said gently. The shifty gaze was hatefully familiar, but she was a 
physician, protective of the hurt. "You may not remember it yet Something attacked you. You were in 
the forest�" 
"Ah!" he cried out, his eyes growing bright and his features contorting. "The forest�in the forest�" 
"What's in the forest?" 
He grasped for breath. A look of clearer consciousness came into his face. After a while he said, "I don't 
know." 
"Did you see what attacked you?" Harfex asked. 
110-^ BUFFALO GALS 
"I don't know." '.. 
"You remember it now." 
"I don't know." 
"All our lives may depend on this. You must tell us what you saw!" 
"I don't know," Osden said, sobbing with weakness. He was too weak to hide the fact that he was hiding 
the answer, yet he would not say it. Porlock, nearby, was chewing his pepper-colored mustache as he 
tried to hear what was going on in the cubicle. Harfex leaned over Osden and said, "You will tell us�" 
Tomiko had to interfere bodily. 
Harfex controlled himself with an effort that was painful to see. He went off silently to his cubicle, 
where no doubt he took a double or triple dose of tranquilizers. The other men and women scattered 
about the big frail building a long main hall and ten sleeping-cubicles, said nothing, but looked 
depressed and edgy. Osden, as always, even now, had them all at his mercy. Tomiko looked down at 
him with a rush of hatred that burned in her throat like bile. This monstrous egotism that fed itself on 
others' emotions, this absolute selfishness, was worse than any hideous deformity of the flesh. Like a 
congenital monster, he should not have lived. Should not be alive. Should have died. Why had his head 
not been split open? 
As he lay flat and white, his hands helpless at his sides, his colorless eyes were wide open, and there 
were tears running from the comers. He tried to flinch away. "Don't," he said in a weak hoarse voice, 

and tried to raise his hands to protect his head. "Don't!" 
She sat down on the folding-stool beside the cot, and after a while put her hand on his. He tried to pull 
away, but lacked the strength. 
A long silence fell between them. 
"Osden," she murmured, "I'm sorry. I'm very sorry. I will you well. Let me will you well, Osden. I don't 
want to hurt 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow ^.111 
you. Listen, I do see now. It was one of us. That's right, isn't it No, don't answer, only tell me if I'm 
wrong; but I'm not... Of course there are animals on this planet Ten of them. I don't care who it was. It 
doesn't matter, does it. It could have been me, just now. I realize that I didn't understand how it is, 
Osden. You can't see how difficult it is for us to understand ... But listen. If it were love, instead of hate 
and fear... It is never love?" 
"No." 
"Why not? Why should it never be? Are human beings all so weak? That is terrible. Never mind, never 
mind, don't worry. Keep still. At least right now it isn't hate, is it? Sympathy at least, concern, wellwishing, 
you do feel that, Osden? Is it what you feel?" 
"Among... other things," he said, almost inaudibly. 
"Noise from my subconscious, I suppose. And everybody else in the room... Listen, when we found you 
there in the forest, when I tried to turn you over, you partly wakened, and I felt a horror of you. I was 
insane with fear for a minute. Was that your fear of me I felt?" 
"No." 
Her hand was still on his, and he was quite relaxed, sinking towards sleep, like a man in pain who has 
been given relief from pain. "The forest," he muttered; she could barely understand him. "Afraid." 
She pressed him no further, but kept her hand on his and watched him go to sleep. She knew what she 
felt, and what therefore he must feel. She was confident of it there is only one emotion, or state of being 
that can thus wholly reverse itself, polarize, within one moment In Great Hainish indeed there is one 
word, onto, for love and for hate. She was not in love with Osden, of course, that was another kettle of 
fish. What she felt for him was onto, polarized hate. She held his hand and the current flowed between 
them, the tremendous electricity of touch, which he had always dreaded. As 
BUFFALO GALS 

he slept the ring of anatomy-chart muscles around his mouth relaxed, and Tomiko saw on his face what 
none of them had ever seen, very faint, a smile. It faded. He slept on. 
He was tough; next day he was sitting up, and hungry. Harfex wished to interrogate him, but Tomiko put 
him off. | She hung a sheet of polythene over the cubicle door, as | Osden himself had often done. "Does 
it actually cut down | your empathic reception?" she asked, and he replied, in the dry, cautious tone they 
were now using to each other, "No." 
"Just a warning then." 
"Partly. More faith-healing Dr. Hammergeld thought it worked . . . Maybe it does, a little." 
There had been love, once. A terrified child, suffocating in the tidal rush and battering of the hugeemotions 
of adults, a ? drowning child, saved by one man. Taught to breathe, to live, by one man. Given 
everything, all protection and love, by one man. Father/Mother/God: no other. "Is he still alive?" 
Tomiko asked, thinking of Osden's incredible loneliness, and the strange cruelty of the great doctors. 
She was shocked when she heard his forced, tinny laugh. "He died at least two and a half centuries ago," 
Osden said. "Do you forget where we are, Coordinator? We've all left our little families behind . . ." 
Outside the polythene curtain the eight other human beings on World 4470 moved vaguely. Their voices 
were low and strained. Eskwana slept; Poswet To was in therapy; Jenny Chong was trying to rig lights in 
her cubicle so that she wouldn't cast a shadow. 
"They're all scared," Tomiko said, scared. "They've all got these ideas about what attacked you. A sort of 
ape-potato, a giant fanged spinach, I don't know . . . Even Harfex. You may be right not to force them to 
see. That would be worse, to lose confidence in one another. But why are we all so shaky, unable to face 
the fact, going to pieces so easily? Are we really all insane?" 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow "^L 113 
"Well soon be more so." 
"Why?" 
"There is something." He closed his mouth, the muscles of his lips stood out rigid. 
"Something sentient?" 
"A sentience." 
"In the forest?" He nodded. 

"What is it, then�?" 
"The fear." He began to look strained again, and moved restlessly. "When I fell, there, you know, I didn't 
lose consciousness at once. Or I kept regaining it I don't know. It was more like being paralyzed." 
"You were." 
"I was on the ground. I couldn't get up. My face was in the dirt, in that soft leaf mold. It was in my 
nostrils and eyes. I couldn't move. Couldn't see. As if I was in the ground. Sunk into it part of it I knew I 
was between two trees even though I never saw them. I suppose I could feel the roots. Below me in the 
ground, down under the ground. My hands were bloody, I could feel that and the blood made the dirt 
around my face sticky. I felt the fear. It kept growing As if they'd finally known I was there, lying on 
them there, under them, among them, the thing they feared, and yet part of their fear itself. I couldn't 
stop sending the fear back, and it kept growing and I couldn't move, I couldn't get away. I would pass 
out I think, and then the fear would bring me to again, and I still couldn't move. Any more than they 
can." 
Tomiko felt the cold stirring of her hair, the readying of the apparatus of terror. "They: who are they, 
Osden?" 
"They, it�I don't know. The fear." 
"What is he talking about?" Harfex demanded when Tomiko reported this conversation. She would not 
let Harfex question Osden yet, feeling that she must protect Osden from the onslaught of the 
Hainishman's powerful, 
114^BUFFALO GALS 
over-repressed emotions. Unfortunately this fueled the slow fire of paranoid anxiety that burned in poor 
Harfex, and he thought she and Osden were in league, hiding some fact of great importance or peril from 
the rest of the team. 
"It's like the blind man trying to describe the elephant Osden hasn't seen or heard the... the sentience, any 
more than we have." 
"But he's felt it, my dear Haito," Harfex said with just-suppressed rage. "Not empathically. On his skull. 
It came and knocked him down and beat him with a blunt instrument Did he not catch one glimpse of it?" 
"What would he have seen, Harfex?" Tomiko said, but he would not hear her meaningful tone; even he 
had blocked out that comprehension. What one fears is alien. The murderer is an outsider, a foreigner, 
not one of us. The evil is not in me! 
"The first blow knocked him pretty well out," Tomiko said a little wearily, "he didn't see anything. But 

when he came to again, alone in the forest, he felt a great fear. Not his own fear; an empathic effect. He 
is certain of that And certain it was nothing picked up from any of us. So that evidently the native lifeforms 
are not all insentient" 
Harfex looked at her a moment, grim. 'You're trying to frighten me, Haito. I do not understand your 
motives." He got up and went off to his laboratory table, walking slowly and stiffly, like a man of eighty 
not of forty. 
She looked around at the others. She felt some desperation. Her new, fragile, and profound 
interdependence with Osden gave her, she was well aware, some added strength. But if even Harfex 
could not keep his head, who of the others would? Porlock and Eskwana were shut in their cubicles, the 
others were all working or busy with something. There was something queer about their positions. For a 
while the Coordinator could not tell what it was, then she saw that they were all sitting facing the nearby 
forest Playf 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow "^.115 
ing chess with Asnanifoil, Olleroo had edged her chair around until it was almost beside his. 
She went to Mannon, who was dissecting a tangle of spidery brown roots, and told him to look for the 
pattern-puzzle. He saw it at once, and said with unusual brevity, "Keeping an eye on the enemy." 
"What enemy? What do you feel, Mannon?" She had a sudden hope in him as a psychologist, on this 
obscure ground of hints and empathies where biologists went astray. 
"I feel a strong anxiety with a specific spatial orientation. But I am not an empath. Therefore the anxiety 
is explicable in terms of the particular stress-situation, that is, the attack on a team member in the forest, 
and also in terms of the total stress-situation, that is, my presence in a totally alien environment for 
which the archetypical connotations of the word 'forest' provide an inevitable metaphor." 
Hours later Tomiko woke to hear Osden screaming in nightmare; Mannon was calming him, and she 
sank back into her own dark-branching pathless dreams. In the morning Eskwana did not wake. He 
could not be roused with stimulant drugs. He clung to his sleep, slipping farther and farther back, 
mumbling softly now and then until, wholly regressed, he lay curled on his side, thumb at his lips, gone. 
"Two days; two down. Ten little Indians, nine little Indians..." That was Porlock 
"And you're the next little Indian," Jenny Chong snapped. "Go analyze your urine, Porlock!" 
"He is driving us all insane," Porlock said, getting up and waving his left arm. "Can't you feel it? For 
God's sake, are you all deaf and blind? Can't you feel what he's doing the emanations? It all comes from 
him�from his room there�from his mind. He is driving us all insane with fear!" 

116 JT BUFFALO GALS 
"Who is?" said Asnanifoil, looming precipitous and hairy over the little Terran. 
"Do I have to say his name? Osden, then. Osden! Osden! Why do you think I tried to kill him? In selfdefense! 
To save all of us! Because you won't see what he's doing to us. He's sabotaged the mission by 
making us quarrel, and now he's going to drive us all insane by projecting fear at us so that we can't 
sleep or mink, like a huge radio that doesn't make any sound, but it broadcasts all the time, and you can't 
sleep, and you can't think. Haito and Harfex are already under his control but the rest of you can be 
saved. I had to do it!" 
'You didn't do it very well," Osden said, standing half-naked, all rib and bandage, at the door of his 
cubicle. "I could have hit myself harder. Hell, it isn't me that's scaring you blind, Porlock, it's out there� 
there, in the woods!" 
Porlock made an ineffectual attempt to assault Osden; Asnanifoil held him back, and continued to hold 
him effortlessly while Mannon gave him a sedative shot He was put away shouting about giant radios. In 
a minute the sedative took effect, and he joined a peaceful silence to Eskwana's. 
"All right," said Harfex. "Now, Osden, you'll tell us what you know and all you know." 
Osden said, "I don't know anything" 
He looked battered and faint Tomiko made him sit down before he talked. 
"After I'd been three days in the forest, I thought I was occasionally receiving some kind of affect" 
"Why didn't you report it?" 
"Thought I was going spla, like the rest of you." 
"That, equally, should have been reported." 
"You'd have called me back to base. I couldn't take it You realize that my inclusion in the mission was a 
bad mistake. I'm not able to coexist with nine other neurotic 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow "^.117 
personalities at close quarters. I was wrong to volunteer for Extreme Survey, and the Authority was 
wrong to accept me." 
No one spoke; but Tomiko saw, with certainty this time, the flinch in Osden's shoulders and the 
tightening of his facial muscles, as he registered their bitter agreement 

"Anyhow, I didn't want to come back to base because I was curious. Even going psycho, how could I 
pick up empathic effects when there was no creature to emit them? They weren't bad, then. Very vague. 
Queer. Like a draft in a closed room, a flicker in the corner of your eye. Nothing really." 
For a moment he had been borne up on their listening: they heard, so he spoke. He was wholly at their 
mercy. If they disliked him he had to be hateful; if they mocked him he became grotesque; if they 
listened to him he was the storyteller. He was helplessly obedient to the demands of their emotions, 
reactions, moods. And there were seven of them, too many to cope with, so that he must be constantly 
knocked about from one to another's whim. He could not find coherence. Even as he spoke and held 
them, somebody's attention would wander Olleroo perhaps was thinking that he wasn't unattractive, 
Harfex was seeking the ulterior motive of his words, Asnanifoil's's mind, which could not be long held 
by the concrete, was roaming off towards the eternal peace of number, and Tomiko was distracted by 
pity, by fear. Osden's voice faltered. He lost the thread. "I... I thought it must be the trees," he said, and 
stopped. 
"It's not the trees," Harfex said. "They have no more nervous system than do plants of the Hainish 
Descent on Earth. None." 
"You're not seeing the forest for the trees, as they say on Earth," Mannon put in, smiling elfinly; Harfex 
stared at him. "What about those root-nodes weVe been puzzling about for twenty days�eh?" 
118 JT BUFFALO GALS 
"What about them?" 
"They are, indubitably, connections. Connections among the trees. Right? Now let's just suppose, most 
improbably, that you knew nothing of animal brain-structure. And you were given one axon, or one 
detached glial cell, to examine. Would you be likely to discover what it was? Would you see that the cell 
was capable of sentience?" 
"No. Because it isn't A single cell is capable of mechanical response to stimulus. No more. Are you 
hypothesizing that individual arboriformes are 'cells' in a kind of brain, Mannon?" 
"Not exactly. I'm merely pointing out that they are all interconnected, both by the root-node linkage and 
by your green epiphytes in the branches. A linkage of incredible complexity and physical extent Why, 
even the prairie grass-forms have those root-connectors, don't they? I know that sentience or intelligence 
isn't a thing, you can't find it in, or analyze it out from, the cells of a brain. It's a function of the 
connected cells. It is, in a sense, the connection: the connectedness. It doesn't exist I'm not trying to say 
it exists. I'm only guessing that Osden might be able to describe it" 
And Osden took him up, speaking as if in trance. "Sentience without senses. Blind, deaf, nerveless, 
moveless. Some irritability, response to touch. Response to sun, to light, to water, and chemicals in the 

earth around the roots. Nothing comprehensible to an animal mind. Presence without mind. Awareness 
of being, without object or subject Nirvana." 
"Then why do you receive fear?" Tomiko asked in a low voice. 
"I don't know. I can't see how awareness of objects, of others, could arise: an unperceiving response... 
But there was an uneasiness, for days. And then when I lay between the two trees and my blood was on 
their roots�" Osden's 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow^-119 
face glittered with sweat. "It became fear," he said shrilly, "only fear." 
"If such a function existed," Harfex said, "it would not be capable of conceiving of a self-moving, 
material entity, or responding to one. It could no more become aware of us than we can *become aware' 
of Infinity." 
" The silence of those infinite expanses terrifies me,'" muttered Tomiko. "Pascal was aware of Infinity. 
By way of fear." 
"To a forest," Mannon said, "we might appear as forest fires. Hurricanes. Dangers. What moves quickly 
is dangerous, to a plant The rootless would be alien, terrible. And if it is mind, it seems only too 
probable that it might become aware of Osden, whose own mind is open to connection with all others so 
long as he's conscious, and who was lying in pain and afraid within it, actually inside it. No wonder it 
was afraid�" 
"Not 'it,'" Harfex said. "There is no being, no huge creature, no person! There could at most be only a 
function�" 
"There is only a fear," Osden said. 
They were all still a while, and heard the stillness outside. 
"Is that what I feel all the time coming up behind me?" Jenny Chong asked, subdued. 
Osden nodded. "You all feel it, deaf as you are. Eskwana's the worst off, because he actually has some 
empathic capacity. He could send if he learned how, but he's too weak, never will be anything but a 
medium." 
"Listen, Osden," Tomiko said, "you can send. Then send to it�the forest, the fear out there�tell it that 
we won't hurt it Since it has, or is, some sort of affect that translates into what we feel as emotion, can't 
you translate back? Send out a message, We are harmless, we are friendly." 

"You must know that nobody can emit a false empathic message, Haito. You can't send something that 
doesn't exist" 
120 JT BUFFALO GALS 
"But we don't intend harm, we are friendly." 
"Are we? In the forest, when you picked me up, did you feel friendly?" 
"No. Terrified. But that's�it, the forest, the plants, not my own fear, isn't it?" 
"What's the difference? It's all you felt Can't you see," and Osden's voice rose in exasperation, "why I 
dislike you and you dislike me, all of you? Can't you see that I retransmit every negative or aggressive 
affect you've felt towards me since we first met? I return your hostility, with thanks. I do it in selfdefense. 
Like Porlock. It is self-defense, though; it's the only technique I developed to replace my 
original defense of total withdrawal from others. Unfortunately it creates a closed circuit, self-sustaining 
and self-reinforcing. Your initial reaction to me was the instinctive antipathy to a cripple; by now of 
course it's hatred. Can you fail to see my point? The forest mind out there transmits only terror, now, and 
the only message I can send it is terror, because when exposed to it I can feel nothing except terror!" 
"What must we do, then?" said Tomiko, and Mannon replied promptly, "Move camp. To another 
continent If there are plant-minds there, they'll be slow to notice us, as this one was; maybe they won't 
notice us at all." || 
"It would be a considerable relief," Osden observedi stiffly. The others had been watching him with a 
new curij f osity. He had revealed himself, they had seen him as he was, a helpless man in a trap. 
Perhaps, like Tomiko, they had seen that the trap itself, his crass and cruel egotism, was their own 
construction, not his. They had built the cage and locked him in it, and like a caged ape he threw filth 
out through the bars. If, meeting him, they had offered trust, if they had been strong enough to offer him 
love, how ( might he have appeared to them? 
None of them could have done so, and it was too lat 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow "^-121 
now. Given time, given solitude, Tomiko might have built up with him a slow resonance of feeling a 
consonance of trust, a harmony; but there was no time, their job must be done. There was not room 
enough for the cultivation of so great a thing, and they must make do with sympathy, with pity, the small 
change of love. Even that much had given her strength, but it was nowhere near enough for him. She 
could see in his flayed face now his savage resentment of their curiosity, even of her pity. 
"Go lie down, that gash is bleeding again," she said, and he obeyed her. 

Next morning they packed up, melted down the spray-form hangar and living quarters, lifted Gum on 
mechanical drive and took her halfway round World 4470, over the red and green lands, the many warm 
green seas. They had picked out a likely spot on continent G: a prairie, twenty thousand square kilos of 
windswept graminiformes. No forest was within a hundred kilos of the site, and there were no lone trees 
or groves on the plain. The plant-forms occurred only in large species-colonies, never intermingled, 
except for certain tiny ubiquitous saprophytes and spore-bearers. The team sprayed holomeld over 
structure forms, and by evening of the thirty-two-hour day were settled in to the new camp. Eskwana 
was still asleep and Porlock still sedated, but everyone else was cheerful. "You can breathe here!" they 
kept saying. 
Osden got on his feet and went shakily to the doorway; leaning there he looked through twilight over the 
dim reaches of the swaying grass that was not grass. There was a faint, sweet odor of pollen on the wind; 
no sound but the soft, vast sibilance of wind. His bandaged head cocked a little, the empath stood 
motionless for a long time. Darkness came, and the stars, lights in the windows of the distant house of 
Man. The wind had ceased, there was no sound. He listened. 
122-^BUFFALO GALS 
In the long night Haito Tomiko listened. She lay still and heard the blood in her arteries, the breathing of 
sleepers, the wind blowing, the dark veins running the dreams advancing the vast static of stars 
increasing as the universe died slowly, the sound of death walking. She struggled out of her bed, fled the 
tiny solitude of her cubicle. Eskwana alone slept. Porlock lay straitjacketed, raving softly in his obscure 
native tongue. Olleroo and Jenny Chong were playing cards, grim-faced. Poswet To was in the therapy 
niche, plugged in. Asnanifoil was drawing a mandala, the Third Pattern of the Primes. Mannon and 
Harfex were sitting up with Osden. 
She changed the bandages on Osden's head. His lank, reddish hair, where she had not had to shave it, 
looked strange. It was salted with white, now. Her hands shook as she worked. Nobody had yet said 
anything 
"How can the fear be here too?" she said, and her voice rang flat and false in the terrific silence. 
"It's not just the trees; the grasses..." 
"But we're twelve thousand kilos from where we were this morning we left it on the other side of the 
planet" 
"It's all one," Osden said. "One big green thought How long does it take a thought to get from one side 
of your brain to the other?" 
"It doesn't think. It isn't thinking" Harfex said, lifelessly. "It's merely a network of processes. The 
branches, the epiphytic growths, the roots with those nodal junctures between individuals: they must all 
be capable of transmitting electrochemical impulses. There are no individual plants, then, properly 

speaking. Even the pollen is part of the linkage, no doubt, a sort of windbome sentience, connecting 
overseas. But it is not conceivable. That all the biosphere of a planet should be one network of 
communications, sensitive, irrational, immortal, isolated..." 
"Isolated," said Osden. "That's it! That's the fear. It isn't 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow "^-123 
that we're motile, or destructive. It's just that we are. We are other. There has never been any other." 
"You're right," Mannon said, almost whispering "It has no peers. No enemies. No relationship with 
anything but itself. One alone forever." 
"Then what's the function of its intelligence in species-survival?" 
"None, maybe," Osden said. "Why are you getting tele-ological, Harfex? Aren't you a Hainishman? Isn't 
the measure of complexity the measure of the eternal joy?" 
Harfex did not take the bait He looked ill. "We should leave this world," he said. 
"Now you know why I always want to get out, get away from you," Osden said with a kind of morbid 
geniality. "It isn't pleasant, is it�the other's fear... ? If only it were an animal intelligence. I can get 
through to animals. I get along with cobras and tigers; superior intelligence gives one the advantage. I 
should have been used in a zoo, not on a human team... If I could get through to the damned stupid 
potato! If it wasn't so overwhelming... I still pick up more than the fear, you know. And before it 
panicked it had a�there was a serenity. I couldn't take it in, then, I didn't realize how big it was. To 
know the whole daylight, after all, and the whole night All the winds and lulls together. The winter stars 
and the summer stars at the same time. To have roots, and no enemies. To be entire. Do you see? No 
invasion. No others. To be whole..." 
He had never spoken before, Tomiko thought 
"You are defenseless against it, Osden," she said. "Your personality has changed already. You're 
vulnerable to it We may not all go mad, but you will, if we don't leave." 
He hesitated, then he looked up at Tomiko, the first time he had ever met her eyes, a long still look, clear 
as water. 
What's sanity ever done for me?" he said, mocking "But you have a point, Haito. You have something 
there." 
\7AJT BUFFALO GALS 

"We should get away," Harfex muttered. 
"If I gave in to it," Osden mused, "could I communicate?" 
"By 'give in,'" Mannon said in a rapid, nervous voice, "I assume that you mean, stop sending back the 
empathic information which you receive from the plant-entity: stop rejecting the fear, and absorb it That 
will either kill you at once, or drive you back into total psychological withdrawal, autism." 
"Why?" said Osden. "Its message is rejection. But my salvation is rejection. It's not intelligent But I am." 
"The scale is wrong What can a single human brain achieve against something so vast?" 
"A single human brain can perceive pattern on the scale of stars and galaxies," Tomiko said, "and 
interpret it as Love." 
Mannon looked from one to the other of them; Harfex was silent 
"It'd be easier in the forest," Osden said. "Which of you will fly me over?" 
"When?" 
"Now. Before you all crack up or go violent" 
"I will," Tomiko said. 
"None of us will," Harfex said. 
"I can't," Mannon said. "I...I am too frightened. I'd crash the jet" 
"Bring Eskwana along. If I can pull this off, he might serve as a medium." 
"Are you accepting the Sensor's plan, Coordinator?" Harfex asked formally. 
"Yes." 
"I disapprove. I will come with you, however." 
"I think we're compelled, Harfex," Tomiko said, looking at Osden's face, the ugly white mask 
transfigured, eager as a lover's face. 
Olleroo and Jenny Chong playing cards to keep their 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow "^.125 

thoughts from their haunted beds, their mounting dread, chattered like scared children. "This thing it's in 
the forest, it'll get you�" 
"Scared of the dark?" Osden jeered. 
"But look at Eskwana, and Porlock, and even Asnanifoil�" 
"It can't hurt you. It's an impulse passing through synapses, a wind passing through branches. It is only a 
nightmare." 
They took off in a helijet, Eskwana curled up still sound asleep in the rear compartment, Tomiko 
piloting Harfex and Osden silent, watching ahead for the dark line of the forest across the vague grey 
miles of starlit plain. They neared the black line, crossed it; now under them was darkness. 
She sought a landing place, flying low, though she had to fight her frantic wish to fly high, to get out, get 
away. The huge vitality of the plant-world was far stronger here in the forest and its panic beat in 
immense dark waves. There was a pale patch ahead, a bare knoll-top a little higher than the tallest of the 
black shapes around it; the not-trees; the rooted; the parts of the whole. She set the helijet down in the 
glade, a bad landing Her hands on the stick were slippery, as if she had rubbed them with cold soap. 
About them now stood the forest, black in darkness. 
Tomiko cowered and shut her eyes. Eskwana moaned in his sleep. Harfex's breath came short and loud, 
and he sat rigid, even when Osden reached across him and slid the door open. 
Osden stood up; his back and bandaged head were just visible in the dim glow of the control panel as he 
paused stooping in the doorway. 
Tomiko was shaking She could not raise her head. "No, no, no, no, no, no, no," she said in a whisper. 
"No. No. No." 
Osden moved suddenly and quietly, swinging out of the doorway, down into the dark. He was gone. 
12GJ? BUFFALO GALS 
/ am coming! said a great voice that made no sound. 
Tomiko screamed. Harfex coughed; he seemed to be trying to stand up, but did not do so. 
Tomiko drew in upon herself, all centered in the blind eye in her belly, in the center of her being; and 
outside that there was nothing but the fear. 

It ceased. 
She raised her head; slowly unclenched her hands. She sat up straight The night was dark, and stars 
shone over the forest There was nothing else. 
"Osden," she said, but her voice would not come. She spoke again, louder, a lone bullfrog croak. There 
was no reply. 
She began to realize that something had gone wrong with Harfex. She was trying to find his head in the 
darkness, for he had slipped down from the seat, when all at once, in the dead quiet, in the dark rear 
compartment of the craft, a voice spoke. "Good," it said. It was Eskwana's voice. She snapped on the 
interior lights and saw the engineer lying curled up asleep, his hand half over his mouth. 
The mouth opened and spoke. "All well," it said. 
"Osden�" 
"All well," said the voice from Eskwana's mouth. 
"Where are you?" 
Silence. ^ 
"Comeback." -\\ 
A wind was rising. "Ill stay here," the soft voice said. I<< 
"You can't stay�" 
Silence. 
"You'd be alone, Osden!" 
"Listen." The voice was fainter, slurred, as if lost in the sound of wind. "Listen. I will you well." 
She called his name after that, but there was no answer. Eskwana lay still. Harfex lay stiller. 
"Osden!" she cried, leaning out the doorway into the 
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow "^.127 
dark, wind-shaken silence of the forest of being. "I will come back. I must get Harfex to the base. I will 
come back, Osden!" 

Silence and wind in leaves. 
They finished the prescribed survey of World 4470, the eight of them; it took them forty-one days more. 
Asnanifoil and one or another of the women went into the forest daily at first, searching for Osden in the 
region around the bare knoll, though Tomiko was not in her heart sure which bare knoll they had landed 
on that night in the very heart and vortex of terror. They left piles of supplies for Osden, food enough for 
fifty years, clothing tents, tools. They did not go on searching there was no way to find a man alone, 
hiding if he wanted to hide, in those unending labyrinths and dim corridors vine-entangled, root-floored. 
They might have passed within arm's reach of him and never seen him. 
But he was there; for there was no fear any more. Rational, and valuing reason more highly after an 
intolerable experience of the immortal mindless, Tomiko tried to understand rationally what Osden had 
done. But the words escaped her control. He had taken the fear into himself, and, accepting had 
transcended it He had given up his self to the alien, an unreserved surrender, that left no place for evil. 
He had learned the love of the Other, and thereby had been given his whole self.�But this is not the 
vocabulary of reason. 
The people of the Survey team walked under the trees, through the vast colonies of life, surrounded by a 
dreaming silence, a brooding calm that was half aware of them and wholly indifferent to them. There 
were no hours. Distance was no matter. Had we but world enough and time... The planet turned between 
the sunlight and the great dark; winds of winter and summer blew fine, pale pollen across the quiet seas. 
128-^BUFFALO GALS 
Gum returned after many surveys, years, and lighryears, to what had several centuries ago been 
Smeming Port There were still men there, to receive (incredulously) the team's reports, and to record its 
losses: Biologist Harfex, dead of fear, and Sensor Osden, left as a colonist 
(1971) 
VI 
Seven Bird and Beast Poems 
Various real or imaginary relations and comminglings of human and other beings are going on here. The 
last one is a true ghost story. 
The first one is a joke about one of my favorite kinds of bird, the acorn woodpecker (Melanerpes 
formicivorus in Latin, boso in Kesh). They are handsome little woodpeckers, still common in Northern 
California, splendidly marked, with a red cap, and a white circle round the eye giving them a clown's 
mad stare. They talk all the time�the loud yacka-yacka-yacka call, and all kinds of mutters, whirs, 
purrs, comments, criticisms, and gossip going on constantly among the foraging or housekeeping group. 

They are familial or tribal. Cousins and aunts help a mated pair feed and bring up the babies. Why they 
make holes and drop acorns into them when they can't get the acorns back out of the holes is still a 
question (to ornithologists�not to acorn woodpeckers). When we removed the wasp- and woodpeckerriddled 
back outer wall of an old California farmhouse last year, about a ton of acorns fell out, all wormhollowed 
husks; they had never been accessible to the generations of Bosos who had been diligently 
dropping them in since 1870 or so. But in the walls of the bam are neat rows of little holes, each one 
with a longValky Oak acorn stuck in, a perfect fit, almost like rivets in sheet iron. These, presumably, 
are winter supply. On the other hand, they might be a woodpecker an form. Another funny thing they do 
is in spring, very early in the morning when a male wants to assert the tribal territory and/or impress the 
hell out of some redhead. 
131 
132 JT BUFFALO GALS 
He finds a tree that makes a really loud sound, and drums on it. The loudest tree these days�a fine 
example of the interfacing of human and woodpecker cultures�is a metal chimney sticking up from a 
farmhouse roof. A woodpecker doing the kettledrum reveille on the stovepipe is a real good way to start 
the day at attention. 
Seven Bird and Beast Poems "^-133 
What is Going on in The Oaks Around the Barn 
The Acorn Woodpeckers are constructing an Implacable Pecking Machine to attack oaks and whack 
holes to stack acorns in. 
They have not perfected 
it yet They keep cranking 
it up ratchet by ratchet 
by ratchet each morning 
till a Bluejay yells, "SCRAP!" 
and it all collapses 
into black-and-white flaps and flutters 
and redheads muttering curses 

in the big, protecting branches. 
For Ted 
The hawk shapes the wind and the curve of the wind 
Like eggs lie the great gold hills in the curve of the world to that keen eye 
The children wait 
The hawk declares height by his fell fall 
The children cry 
Comes the high hunter carrying the kill curving the winds with strong wings 
To the old hawk 
all earth is prey, and child 
(1973) 
(1986) 
134-^ BUFFALO GALS 
Found Poem 
However, Bruce Baird, Laguna Beach's chief lifeguard, doubts that sea lions could ever replace, or even 
really aid, his staff. "If you were someone from Ohio, and you were in the water having trouble and a 
sea lion approached you, well, it would require a whole lot more public education," he told the Orange 
County Register. 
�PAUL SIMON, for AP, 17 December 1984 
If I am ever someone from Ohio 
in the water having trouble 
off a continent's west edge 
and am translated to my element 

by a sudden warm great animal 
with sea-dark fur sleek shining 
and the eyes of Shiva, 
I hope to sink my troubles like a stone 
and all uneducated ride 
her inshore shouting with the foam 
praises of the freedom to be saved. 
(1986) 
Totem 
Mole my totem mound builder maze maker tooth at the root shaper of darkness into ways and hollows 
in grave alive heavy handed light blinded 
Seven Bird and Beast Poems *^-135 
Winter Downs 
(For Barbara) 
Eyes look at you. Thorns catch at you. Heart starts and bleats. 
The looks are rocks white-ringed with chalk: flint fish-eyes of old seas, sheep's flint-dark gaze. 
Chalk is sheep-white. 
Clouds take shape 
and quiet of sheep. 
Thorn's hands hold stolen fleece. 
The stones sleep open-eyed. 
Keep watch: be not afraid. 

The Man Eater 
They'd all run away then. We came out of the hovels by the well to wait as that one came soft from the 
branched dark into the moon-round singing to wear garlands by children woven, given. An old one of us 
(1980) 
(1986) 
136-^" BUFFALO GALS 
brought the goat out fed well, also garlanded, but that one ignored the goat and cast about among huts 
and gardens hunting hunting. 
"They're gone," we sang while the children let the goat go. 
"They ran away," we sang, dancing, dancing hunting with that one, with her who is branched with 
darkness and shining, and is not afraid. 
VII 
(1986) 
Sleeping Out 
Don't turn on the flashlight, we won't see 
what's crashing its way slow 
down there in the foggy darkness 
thickening the air with a smell 
like wet deadness smoldering, 
or why the crickets went still 
and coyotes giggle behind the hill. 
The light will make a hole 
in the air and what we fear 

will be more there all round 
it in the dark brash and the old dark mind. 
(1985) 
"The White Donkey and "Horse Camp" 
In these two stories, the relationship is that natural, universal and mysterious one between the child and 
the animal. 
"The White Donkey" was written in the white-hot dawn of a summer morning during the Writers 
Conference at Indiana University. I had asked the writers in my workshop to write a "last contact" story 
�"first contact" is a very common theme in science fiction, of which the films Close Encounters of the 
Third Kind and E.T. are trivial but familiar examples. This story, however, is not science fiction but 
fantasy, since the creature in question is not an 'alien' or an extra-terrestrial, but just the opposite. It is an 
animal whose habitat is restricted to the human imagination. Even there it flourishes only within the 
Western European ecosystem, where a few years ago it experienced quite a population explosion, 
reproducing itself all over greeting cards, posters, book covers, and other curious ecological niches. But 
to the child in this story, no recognition is possible. 
"Horse Camp" seems to trouble people, even some who have gone through, or had daughters go through, 
the "horse stage." Perhaps what troubles them is that one can hear in it a yell of freedom and a scream 
from the trap in the same voice at the same time. Or maybe they just want to know how. / don't know. 
139 
140 JT 
The White Donkey 
THERE WERE SNAKES IN THE OLD STONE PLACE, but the grass grew so green and rank there 
that she brought the goats back every day. "The goats are looking fat," Nana said. "Where are you 
grazing them, Sita?" And when Sita said, "At the old stone place, in the forest," Nana said, "It's a long 
way to take them," and Uncle Hira said, "Look out for snakes in that place," but they were thinking of 
the goats, not of her so she did not ask them, after all, about the white donkey. 
She had seen the donkey first when she was putting flowers on the red stone under the pipal tree at the 
edge of the forest She liked that stone. It was the Goddess, very old, round, sitting comfortably among 
the roots of the tree. Everybody who passed by there left the Goddess some flowers or poured a bit of 
water on her, and every spring her red paint was renewed. Sita was giving the Goddess a rhododendron 
flower when she looked round, thinking one of the goats was straying off into the forest; but it wasn't a 

goat It was a white animal that had caught her eye, whiter than a Brahminee bull. Sita followed, to see 
what it was. When she saw the neat round rump and the tail like a rope with a tassel, she knew it was a 
donkey; but such a beautiful donkey! And whose? There were three donkeys in the village, and Chandra 
Bose owned two, all of them grey, bony, mournful, laborious beasts. This was a tall, sleek, delicate 
donkey, a wonderful donkey. It could not belong to Chandra Bose, or to anybody in the village, or to 
anybody in the other village. It wore no halter or harness. It must be wild; it must live in the forest alone. 
Sure enough, when she brought the goats along by whis- 
The White Donkey ^. 141 
ding to clever Kala, and followed where the white donkey had gone into the forest, first there was a path, 
and then they came to the place where the old stones were, blocks of stone asbigas houses all half-buried 
and overgrown with grass and kerala vines; and there the white donkey was standing looking back at her 
from the darkness under the trees. 
She thought then that the donkey was a god, because it had a third eye in the middle of its forehead like 
Shiva. But when it turned she saw that that was not an eye, but a horn�not curved like a cow's or a 
goat's horns, a straight spike like a deer's�just the one hom, between the eyes, like Shiva's eye. So it 
might be a kind of god donkey; and in case it was, she picked a yellow flower off the kerala vine and 
offered it, stretching out her open palm. 
The white donkey stood a while considering her and the goats and the flower; then it came slowly back 
among the big stones towards her. It had split hooves like the goats, and walked even more neatly than 
they did. It accepted the flower. Its nose was pinkish-white, and very soft where it snuffled on Sita's 
palm. She quickly picked another flower, and the donkey accepted it too. But when she wanted to stroke 
its face around the short, white, twisted hom and the white, nervous ears, it moved away, looking 
sidelong at her from its long dark eyes. 
Sita was a little afraid of it, and thought it might be a little afraid of her; so she sat down on one of the 
half-buried rocks and pretended to be watching the goats, who were all busy grazing on the best grass 
they had had for months. Presently the donkey came close again, and standing beside Sita, rested its 
curly-bearded chin on her lap. The breath from its nostrils moved the thin glass bangles on her wrist 
Slowly and very gently she stroked the base of the white, nervous ears, the fine, harsh hair at the base of 
the horn, the silken muzzle; and the white donkey stood beside her, breathing long warm breaths. 
142^BUFFALO GALS 
Every day since then she brought the goats there, walking carefully because of snakes; and the goats 
were getting fat; and her friend the donkey came out of the forest every day, and accepted her offering 
and kept her company. 
"One bullock and one hundred rupees cash," said Uncle Hira, "you're crazy if you think we can marry 

her for less!" 
"Moti Lal is a lazy man," Nana said. "Dirty and lazy." 
"Se he wants a wife to work and clean for him! And he'll take her for only one bullock and one hundred 
rupees cash!" 
"Maybe hell settle down when he's married," Nana said. 
So Sita was betrothed to Moti Lal from the other village, who had watched her driving the goats home at 
evening. She had seen him watching her across the road, but had never looked at him. She did not want 
to look at him. 
"This is the last day," she said to the white donkey, while the goats cropped the grass among the big 
carved, fallen stones, and the forest stood all about them in the singing stillness. 'Tomorrow 111 come 
with Uma's little brother to show him the way here. He'll be the village goatherd now. The day after 
tomorrow is my wedding day." 
The white donkey stood still, its curly, silky beard resting against her hand. 
"Nana is giving me her gold bangle," Sita said to the donkey. "I get to wear a red sari, and have henna on 
my feet and hands." 
The donkey stood still, listening 
"Therell be sweet rice to eat at the wedding" Sita said; then she began to cry. 
"Goodbye, white donkey," she said. The white donkey looked at her sidelong and slowly, not looking 
back, moved away from her and walked into the darkness under the trees. 
(1980) 
^-143 
Horse Camp 
ALL THE OTHER SENIORS WERE OVER AT THE street side of the parking lot, but Sal stayed with 
Norah while they waited for the bus drivers. "Maybe youll be in the creek cabin," Sal said, quiet and 
serious. "I had it second year. It's the best one. Number Five." 
"How do they, when do you, like find out, what cabin?" 
"They better remember we're in the same cabin," Ev said, sounding shrill. Norah did not look at her. She 

and Ev had planned for months and known for weeks that they were to be cabin-mates, but what good 
was that if they never found their cabin, and also Sal was not looking at Ev, only at Norah. Sal was cool, 
a tower of ivory. "They show you around, as soon as you get there," she said, her quiet voice speaking 
directly to Norah's lastnight dream of never finding the room where she had to take a test she was late 
for and looking among endless thatched barracks in a forest of thin black trees growing very close 
together like hair under a hand-lens. Norah had told no one the dream and now remembered and forgot it 
"Then you have dinner, and First Campfire," Sal said. "Kimmy's going to be a counselor again. She's 
really neat Listen, you tell old Meredy..." 
Norah drew breath. In all the histories of Horse Camp which she had asked for and heard over and over 
for three years�the thunderstorm story, the horsethief story, the wonderful Stevens Mountain stories� 
in all of them Meredy the handler had been, Meredy said, Meredy did, Meredy knew. 
"Tell him I said hi," Sal said, with a shadowy smile, looking across the parking lot at the far, 
insubstantial towers of 
144 JT BUFFALO GALS 
downtown. Behind them the doors of the Junior Girls bus gasped open. One after another the engines of 
the four busses roared and spewed. Across the asphalt in the hot morning light small figures were lining 
up and climbing into the Junior Boys bus. High, rough, faint voices bawled. "OK, hey, have fun," Sal 
said. She hugged Norah and then, keeping a hand on her arm, looked down at her intently for a moment 
from the tower of ivory. She turned away. Norah watched her walk lightfoot and buxom across the black 
gap to the others of her kind who enclosed her, greeting her, "Sal! Hey, Sal!" 
Ev was twitching and nickering, "Come on, Nor, come on, well have to sit way at the back, come on!" 
Side by side they pressed into the line below the gaping doorway of the bus. 
In Number Five cabin four iron cots, thin-mattressed, grey-blanketed, stood strewn with bottles of insect 
repellent and styling mousse, T-shirts lettered UCSD and I V Teddy Bears, a flashlight, an apple, a comb 
with hair caught in it, a paperback book open face down: The Black Colt of Pirate Island. Over the 
shingle roof huge second-growth redwoods cast deep shade, and a few feet below the porch the creek 
ran out into sunlight over brown stones streaming bright green weed. Behind the cabin Jim Meredith the 
horse-handler, a short man of fifty who had ridden as a jockey in his teens, walked along the well-beaten 
path, quick and a bit bowlegged. Meredith's lips were pressed firmly together. His eyes, narrow and 
darting, glanced from cabin to cabin, from side to side. Far through the trees high voices cried. 
The Counselors know what is to be known. Red Ginger, blonde Kimmy, and beautiful black Sue: they 
know the vices of Pal, and how to keep Trigger from putting her head down and drinking for ten minutes 
from every creek. They 
Horse Camp \^ 145 

strike the great shoulders smartly, "Aw, get over, you big lunk!" They know how to swim underwater, 
how to sing in harmony, how to get seconds, and when a shoe is loose. They know where they are. They 
know where the rest of Horse Camp is. "Home Creek runs into Little River here," Kimmy says, drawing 
lines in the soft dust with a redwood twig that breaks. "Senior Girls here, Senior Boys across there, 
Junior Birdmen about here."�"Who needs 'em?" says Sue, yawning. "Come on, who's going to help me 
walk the mares?" 
They were all around the campfire on Quartz Meadow after the long first day of the First Overnight The 
counselors were still singing, but very soft, so soft you almost couldn't hear them, lying in the sleeping 
bag listening to One Spot stamp and Trigger snort and the shifting at the pickets, standing in the fine, 
cool alpine grass listening to the soft voices and the sleepers shifting and later one coyote down the 
mountain singing all alone. 
'Nothing wrong with you. Get up!" said Meredy, and slapped her hip. Turning her long delicate head to 
him with a deprecating gaze, Philly got to her feet. She stood a moment, shuddering the reddish silk of 
her flank as if to dislodge flies, tested her left foreleg with caution, and then walked on, step by step. 
Step by step, watching Norah went with her. Inside her body there was still a deep trembling. As she 
passed him, the handler just nodded. 'You're all right," he meant She was all right 
Freedom, the freedom to run, freedom is to run. Freedom is galloping. What else can it be? Only other 
ways to run, imitations of galloping across great highlands with the wind. Oh Philly sweet Philly my 
love! If Ev and Trigger couldn't keep up she'd slow down and come round in a 
146 JT BUFFALO GALS 
while, after a while, over there, across the long long field of grass, once she had learned this by heart and 
knew it forever, the purity, the pure joy. 
"Right leg Nor," said Meredy. And passed on to Cass and Tammy. 
You have to start with the right fore. Everything else is all. right Freedom depends on this, that you start 
with the right fore, that long leg well balanced on its elegant pastern, that you set down that tiptoe 
middle-fingernail so hard and round, and spurn the dirt. Highstepping, trot past old Meredy, who always 
hides his smile 
Shoulder to shoulder, she and �v, in the long neat of afternoon, in a trance of light, across the home 
creek in the dry wild oats and cow parsley of the Long Pasture. "I was afraid before I came here," thinks 
Norah, Incredulous, remembering childhood. She leans her head against Ev's firm and silken side. The 
sting of small flies awakens, the swish of long tails sends to sleep. Down by the creek in a patch of 
coarse grass Philly grazes and dozes. Sue comes striding by, winks wordless, beautiful as a burning coal, 
lazy and purposeful, bound for the shade of the willows. Is it worth getting up to go down to get your 
feet in the cool water? Next year Sal will be too old for a camper, but can come back as a counselor, 
come back here. Norah will come back a second-year camper, Sal a counselor. They will be here. This is 

what freedom is, what goes on, the sun in summer, the wild grass, coming back each year. 
Coming back from the Long Pack Trip to Stevens Mountain weary and dirty, thirsty and in bliss, coming 
down from the high places, in line, Sue jogging just in front of her and Ev half asleep behind her, some 
sound or motion caught and turned Norah's head to look across the alpine 
Horse Camp ^~ 147 
field. On the far side under dark firs a line of horses, mounted and with packs�"Look!" 
Ev snorted, Sue flicked her ears and stopped. Norah halted in line behind her, stretching her neck to see. 
She saw her sister going first in the distant line, the small head proudly borne. She was walking lightfoot 
and easy, fresh, just starting up to the high passes of the mountain. On her back a young man sat erect, 
his fine, fair head turned a little aside, to the forest. One hand was on his thigh, the other on the reins, 
guiding her. Norah called out and then broke from the line, going to Sal, calling out to her. "No, no, no, 
no!" she called. Behind her Ev and then Sue called to her, "Nor! Nor!" 
Sal did not hear or heed. Going straight ahead, the color of ivory, distant in the clear, dry light, she 
stepped into the shadow of the trees. The others and their riders followed, jogging one after the other till 
the last was gone. 
Norah had stopped in the middle of the meadow, and stood in grass in sunlight Flies hummed. 
She tossed her head, turned, and trotted back to the line. She went along it from one to the next, teasing, 
chivying, Kimmy yelling at her to get back in line, till Sue broke out of line to chase her and she ran, and 
then Ev began to run, whinnying shrill, and then Cass, and Philly, and all the rest, the whole bunch, 
cantering first and then running flat out, running wild, racing, heading for Horse Camp and the Long 
Pasture, for Meredy and the long evening standing in the fenced field, in the sweet dry grass, in the 
fetlock-shallow water of the home creek 
(1986) 
Four Cat Poems 
/ have a dream farm which I visit at need, to go around stocking the bams, yards, and pastures. The first 
livestock I bring in is usually a Jersey cow and three or four sheep-Jacobs, maybe. A donkey or two. A 
couple of riding horses� now the farm enlarges and grows woods, hills, long trails... And, if only 
somebody wanted to work them, you can't just have them standing around, but oh, a pair of Shires! to 
see forged 
for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal! 
Sometimes a llama. Several llamas. Rabbits. Or a whole acre, fenced carefully, of guinea pigs. 

Dogs, of course. Yard dogs. Large dogs. Nothing small that yaps. Large, lean, lazy deerhounds. Have to 
pull ticks off long soft ears while hound looks mournful. A standard poodle, most kind and courteous 
being. A big red chow dog Tao dog But listen, you dogs, if you don't treat the cats right, you're out. 
Understand? 
All cats are balloons. All cats are petunias. All cats are mangold-wurzels. All cats are yin enough. All 
cats guide me. 
M
tfj&fjiBm 
151 
Tabby Lorenzo 
The small cat smells of bitter rue 
and autumn night His ears are scarred. 
His dark footpads are like hard flowers. 
On my knee he rests entirely 
trusting and entirely strange, 
a messenger to all indoors 
from the gardens of danger. 
Black Leonard in Negative Space 
All that surrounds the cat is not the cat, is all that is not the cat, is all, is everything, except the animal. It 
will rejoin without a seam when he is dead. To know that no-space is to know what he does not, that 
time is space for love and pain. He does not need to know it 
(1984) 
Four Cat Poems \-153 
A Conversation with a Silence 

What kept you out so late my love? 
I was running, I was running in the dark. 
Dawn and raining when you came home. 
The trees are clouds and roads to me. I run the sweet dirt-darkness in the rain and up where leafy 
chirping sleep-warmths nestle their blood for me. I meet my enemies below: the White One, the Singer. 
What does your brother watch from the window? 
Ghosts in the other garden. 
I don't see ghosts. I go farther 
along the cloud-roads 
to kill where darkness branches in the rain. 
(1986) 
(1978) 
154^BUFFALO GALS 
For Leonard, Darko, and Burton Watson 
A black and white cat 
on May grass waves his tail, suns his beHy 
among wallflowers. 
I am reading a Chinese poet 
called The Old Man Who Does As He Pleases. 
The cat is aware of the writing 
of swallows 
on the white sky. 

We are both old and doing what pleases us 
in the garden. Now I am writing 
and the cat 
is sleeping. 
Whose poem is this? 
IX 
(1982) 
"SchrOdinger's Cat" and "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" 
"SchrOdinger's Cat" isn't exactly an animal story, except in this respect: The cat, which for Erwin 
Schro'dinger was a parable-cat, a figment-cat, the amusing embodiment of a daring hypothesis, enters 
the story as an actual, biagraphico-historical cat (his name was Laurel, and his visit during the writing of 
the story is described exactly as [during the time that] it occurred), and so changes the thoughtexperiment, 
and its results, profoundly. So it is a story about animal presence�and absence. 
So the real presence of an animal in a laboratory�that is, an animal perceived by the experimenting 
scientist not as an object, nor as a subject in the sense of the word 'subject of the experi-menf (as in Nazi 
experiments in pain on human 'subjects'), but as a subject in the philosophical/grammatical sense of a 
sentient existence of the same order as the scientist's existence�so such presence and perception in a 
laboratory where experiments are performed upon animals would profoundly change the nature, and 
probably the results, of the experiments. 
'The Author of the Acacia Seeds" records the entirely fictional results of such 'subjectivism' carried 
rather farther than seems probable. It grew in part out of the arguments over the experiments in language 
acquisition by great apes (in which, of course, if the ape is not approached as a grammatical subject, 
failure of the experiment is guaranteed). Some linguists deny the capacity of apes to talk in quite the 
same spirit in which their intellectual forebears denied the capacity of women to think If these great men 
are threatened by Koko the gorilla speaking a little ASL, how would they feel reading a lab report 
written by the rat? 
157 
158 JT BUFFALO GALS 
Schrddingsr's 

159 
Schrcxiinger's Cat 
AS THINGS APPEAR TO BE COMING TO SOME sort of climax I have withdrawn to this place. It is 
cooler here, and nothing moves fast 
On the way here I met a married couple who were coming apart She had pretty well gone to pieces, but 
he seemed, at first glance, quite hearty. While he was telling me that he had no hormones of any kind, 
she pulled herself together, and by supporting her head in the crook of her right knee and hopping on the 
toes of the right foot, approached us shouting, "Well what's wrong with a person trying to express 
themselves?" The left leg, the arms, and the trunk, which had remained lying in the heap, twitched and 
jerked in sympathy. "Great legs," the husband pointed out, looking at the slim ankle. "My wife has great 
legs." 
A cat has arrived, interrupting my narrative. It is a striped yellow torn with white chest and paws. He has 
long whiskers and yellow eyes. I never noticed before that cats had whiskers about their eyes; is that 
normal? There is no way to tell. As he has gone to sleep on my knee, I shall proceed. 
Where? 
Nowhere, evidently. Yet the impulse to narrate remains. Many things are not worth doing but almost 
anything is worth telling In any case, I have a severe congenital case of Ethica laboris puritanica, or 
Adam's Disease. It is incurable except by total decapitation. I even like to dream when 
asleep, and to try and recall my dreams: it assures me that I haven't wasted seven or eight hours just 
lying there. Now here I am, lying here. Hard at it 
Well, the couple I was telling you about finally broke up. The pieces of him trotted around bouncing and 
cheeping like little chicks, but she was finally reduced to nothing but a mass of nerves: rather like fine 
chicken- wire, in fact, but hopelessly tangled. 
So I came on, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, and grieving This grief is with me still. I 
fear it is part of me, like foot or loin or eye, or may even be myself: for I seem to have no other self, 
nothing further, nothing that lies outside the borders of grief. 
Yet I don't know what I grieve for my wife? my husband? my children, or myself? I can't remember. 
Most dreams are forgotten, try as one will to remember. Yet later music strikes the note and the 
harmonic rings along the mandolin-strings of the mind, and we find tears in our eyes. Some note keeps 
playing that makes me want to cry; but what for? I am not certain. 
The yellow cat, who may have belonged to the couple that broke up, is dreaming His paws twitch now 
and then, and once he makes a small, suppressed remark with his mouth shut I wonder what a cat dreams 

of, and to whom he was speaking just then. Cats seldom waste words. They are quiet beasts. They keep 
their counsel, they reflect They reflect all day, and at night their eyes reflect Overbred Siamese cats 
maybe as noisy as little dogs, and then people say, "They're talking" but the noise is farther from speech 
than is the deep silence of the hound or the tabby. All this cat can say is meow, but maybe in his silences 
he will suggest to me what it is that I have lost, what I am grieving for. I have a feeling that he knows. 
That's why he came here. Cats look out for Number One. 
It was getting awfully hot. I mean, you could touch less 
160-^ BUFFALO GALS 
and less. The stove-burners, for instance; now I know that stove-burners always used to get hot, that was 
their final cause, they existed in order to get hot But they began to get hot without having been turned 
on. Electric units or gas rings, there they'd be when you came into the kitchen for breakfast, all four of 
them glaring away, the air above them shaking like clear jelly with the heatwaves. It did no good to turn 
them off, because they weren't on in the first place. Besides, the knobs and dials were also hot, 
uncomfortable to the touch. 
Some people tried hard to cool them off. The favorite technique was to turn them on. It worked 
sometimes, but you could not count on it Others investigated the phenomenon, tried to get at the root of 
it, the cause. They were probably the most frightened ones, but man is most human at his most 
frightened. In the face of the hot stove-burners they acted with exemplary coolness. They studied, they 
observed. They were like the fellow in Michelangelo's Last Judgment, who has clapped his hands over 
his face in horror as the devils drag him down to Hell�but only over one eye. the other eye is busy 
looking. It's all he can do, but he does it He observes. Indeed, one wonders if Hell would exist, if he did 
not look at it However, neither he, nor the people I am talking about, had enough time to do much about 
it And then finally of course there were the people who did not try to do or think anything about it at all. 
When the water came out of the cold-water taps hot one morning, however, even people who had 
blamed it all on the Democrats began to feel a more profound unease. Before long forks and pencils and 
wrenches were too hot to handle without gloves; and cars were really terrible. It was like opening the 
door of an oven going full blast, to open the door of your car. And by then, other people almost scorched 
your fingers off. A kiss was like a branding iron. Your child's hair flowed along your hand like fire. 
SchrOdingpr's Cat^. 161 
Here, as I said, it is cooler; and, as a matter of fact, this animal is cool. A real cool cat No wonder it's 
pleasant to pet his fur. Also he moves slowly, at least for the most part, which is all the slowness one can 
reasonably expect of a cat He hasn't that frenetic quality most creatures acquired-all they did was ZAP 
and gone. They lacked presence. I suppose birds always tended to be that way, but even the 
hummingbird used to halt for a second in the very center of his metabolic frenzy, and hang still as a hub, 
present, above the fuchsias�then gone again, but you knew something was there besides the blurring 
brightness. But it got so that even robins and pigeons, the heavy impudent birds, were a blur; and as for 

swallows, they cracked the sound barrier. You knew of swallows only by the small, curved sonic booms 
that looped about the eaves of old nouses in the evening 
Worms shot like subway trains through the dirt of gardens, among the writhing roots of roses. 
You could scarcely lay a hand on children, by then: too fast to catch, too hot to hold. They grew up 
before your eyes. 
But then, maybe that's always been true. 
I was interrupted by the cat, who woke and said meow once, then jumped down from my lap and leaned 
against my legs diligently. This is a cat who knows how to get fed. He also knows how to jump. There 
was a lazy fluidity to his leap, as if gravity affected him less than it does other creatures. As a matter of 
fact there were some localized cases, just before I left, of the failure of gravity; but this quality in the 
cat's leap was something quite else. I am not yet in such a state of confusion that I can be alarmed by 
grace. Indeed, I found it reassuring. While I was opening a can of sardines, a person arrived. Hearing the 
knock, I thought it might be the mailman. I 
162 JT BUFFALO GALS 
miss mail very much, so I hurried to the door and said, "Is it the mail?" A voice replied, 'Yah!" I opened 
the door. He came in, almost pushing me aside in his haste. He dumped down an enormous knapsack he 
had been crying straightened up, massaged his shoulders, and said, "Wow!" 
"How did you get here?" 
He stared at me and repeated, "How?" 
At this my thoughts concerning human and animal speech recurred to me, and I decided that this was 
probably not a man, but a small dog. (Large dogs seldom go yah, wow, how, unless it is appropriate to 
do so.) 
"Come on, fella," I coaxed him. "Come, come on, that's a boy, good doggie!" I opened a can of pork and 
beans for him at once, for he looked half starved. He ate voraciously, gulping and lapping. When it was 
gone he said "Wow!" several times. I was just about to scratch him behind the ears when he stiffened, 
his hackles bristling, and growled deep in his throat He had noticed the cat 
The cat had noticed him some time before, without interest, and was now sitting on a copy of The Well- 
Tempered Clavier washing sardine oil off its whiskers. "Wow!" the dog whom I had thought of calling 
Rover, barked. 
"Wow! Do you know what that is? That's Schro'dinger's Cat!" 

"No it's not; not any more; it's my cat," I said, unreasonably offended. 
"Oh, well, SchrOdinger's dead, of course, but it's his cat IVe seen hundreds of picture of it Erwin 
SchrfxJinger, the great physicist, you know. Oh, wow! To think of finding it here!" 
The cat looked coldly at him for a moment, and began to wash its left shoulder with negligent energy. 
An almost religious expression had come into Rover's face. "It was meant," he said in a low, impressive 
tone. 'Yah. It was 
Schro'dinger's Cat^. 163 
meant. It can't be a mere coincidence. It's too improbable. Me, with the box; you, with the cat; to meet� 
here�now." He looked up at me, his eyes shining with happy fervor. "Isn't it wonderful?" he said. "I'll 
get the box set up right away." And he started to tear open his huge knapsack. 
While the cat washed its front paws, Rover unpacked. While the cat washed its tail and belly, regions 
hard to reach gracefully, Rover put together what he had unpacked, a complex task. When he and the cat 
finished their operations simultaneously and looked at me, I was impressed. They had come out even, to 
the very second. Indeed it seemed that something more than chance was involved. I hoped it was not 
myself. 
"What's that?" I asked, pointing to a protuberance on the outside of the box. I did not ask what the box 
was as it was quite clearly a box. 
"The gun," Rover said with excited pride. 
"The gun?" 
"To shoot the cat" 
'To shoot the cat?" 
"Or to not shoot the cat Depending on the photon." 
"The photon?" 
'Yah! It's Schro'dinger's great Gedankenexperiment You see, there's a little emitter here. At Zero Time, 
five seconds after the lid of the box is closed, it will emit one photon. The photon will strike a halfsilvered 
mirror. The quantum mechanical probability of the photon passing through the mirror is exactly 
one-half, isn't it? So! If the photon passes through, the trigger will be activated and the gun will fire. If 
the photon is deflected, the trigger will not be activated and the gun will not fire. Now, you put the cat 
in. The cat is in the box. You close the lid. You go away! You stay away! What happens?" Rover's eyes 
were bright 

"The cat gets hungry?" 
"The cat gets shot�or not shot," he said, seizing my arm, 
164 JT BUFFALO GALS 
Schr&dingefs 
though not, fortunately, in his teeth. "But the gun is silent, perfectly silent The box is soundproof. There 
is no way to know whether or not the cat has been shot, until you lift the lid of the box. There is NO 
way! Do you see how central this is to the whole of quantum theory? Before Zero Time the whole 
system, on the quantum level or on our level, is nice and simple. But after Zero Time the whole system 
can be represented only by a linear combination of two waves. We cannot predict the behavior of the 
photon, and thus, once it has behaved, we cannot predict the state of the system it has determined. We 
cannot predict it! God plays dice with the world! So it is beautifully demonstrated that if you desire 
certainty, any certainty, you must create it yourself!" 
"How?" 
"By lifting the lid of the box, of course," Rover said, looking at me with sudden disappointment, perhaps 
a touch of suspicion, like a Baptist who finds he has been talking church matters not to another Baptist 
as he thought, but a Methodist, or even, God forbid, an Episcopalian. "To find out whether the cat is 
dead or not" 
"Do you mean," I said carefully, "that until you lift the lid of the box, the cat has neither been shot nor 
not been shot?" 
'Yah!" Rover said, radiant with relief, welcoming me back to the fold. "Or maybe, you know, both." 
"But why does opening the box and looking reduce the system back to one probability, either live cat or 
dead cat? Why don't we get included in the system when we lift the lid of the box?" 
There was a pause. "How?" Rover barked, distrustfully. 
"Well, we would involve ourselves in the system, you see, the superposition of two waves. There's no 
reason why ii should only exist inside an open box, is there? so when w< came to look, there we would 
be, you and I, both looking a live cat, and both looking at a dead cat You see?" 
A dark cloud lowered on Rover's eyes and brow. He barked twice in a subdued, harsh voice, and walked 
away. With his back turned to me he said in a firm, sad tone, "You must not complicate the issue. It is 
complicated enough." 

"Are you sure?" 
He nodded. Turning he spoke pleadingly. "Listen. It's all we have�the box. Truly it is. The box. And 
the cat And they're here. The box, the cat, at last. Put the cat in the box. Will you? Will you let me put 
the cat in the box?" 
"No," I said, shocked. 
"Please. Please. Just for a minute. Just for half a minute! Please let me put the cat in the box!" 
"Why?" 
"I can't stand this terrible uncertainty," he said, and burst into tears. 
I stood some while indecisive. Though I felt sorry for the poor son of a bitch, I was about to tell him, 
gently, No; when a curious thing happened. The cat walked over to the box, sniffed around it, lifted his 
tail and sprayed a comer to mark his territory, and then lightly, with that marvelous fluid ease, leapt into 
it. His yellow tail just flicked the edge of the lid as he jumped, and it closed, falling into place with a 
soft, decisive click. 
"The cat is in the box," I said. 
"The cat is in the box," Rover repeated in a whisper, falling to his knees. "Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, 
wow." 
There was silence then: deep silence. We both gazed, I afoot Rover kneeling at the box No sound. 
Nothing happened. Nothing would happen. Nothing would ever happen, until we lifted the lid of the box. 
"Like Pandora," I said in a weak whisper. I could not quite recall Pandora's legend. She had let all the 
plagues and evils out of the box, of course, but there had been something else, too. After all the devils 
were let loose, 
166-^BUFFALO GALS 
something quite different, quite unexpected, had been left. What had it been? Hope? A dead cat? I could 
not remember. 
Impatience welled up in me. I turned on Rover, glaring. He returned the look with expressive brown 
eyes. You can't tell me dogs haven't got souls. 
"Just exactly what are you trying to prove?" I demanded. 
"That the cat will be dead, or not dead," he murmured submissively. "Certainty. All I want is certainty. 

To know for sure that God does play dice with the world!" 
I looked at him for a while with fascinated incredulity. "Whether he does, or doesn't," I said, "do you 
think he's going to leave you a note about it in the box?" I went to the box, and with a rather dramatic 
gesture, flung the lid back. Rover staggered up from his knees, gasping, to look. The cat was, of course, 
not there. 
Rover neither barked, nor fainted, nor cursed, nor wept. He really took it very well. 
"Where is the cat?" he asked at last 
"Where is the box?" 
"Here." 
"Where's here?" 
"Here is now." 
"We used to think so," I said, "but really we could use larger boxes." 
He gazed about him in mute bewilderment, and did not flinch even when the roof of the house was lifted 
off just like the lid of a box, letting in the unconscionable, inordinate light of the stars. He had just time 
to breathe, "Oh, wow!" 
I have identified the note that keeps sounding. I checked it on the mandolin before the glue melted. It is 
the note A, the one that drove the composer Schumann mad. It is a beautiful, clear tone, much clearer 
now that the stars are visible. I shall miss the cat I wonder if he found what it was we lost 
(1974) 
167 
"The Author of the Acacia Seeds" 
and Other Extracts from the Journal 
of the Association of Therolinguistics 
MS. FOUND IN AN ANT-HILL 
The messages were found written in touch-gland exudation on degerminated acacia seeds laid in rows at 
the end of a narrow, erratic tunnel leading off from one of the deeper levels of the colony. It was the 

orderly arrangement of the seeds that first drew the investigator's attention. The messages are 
fragmentary, and the translation approximate and highly interpretative; but the text seems worthy of 
interest if only for its striking lack of resemblance to any other Ant texts known to us. 
SEEDS 1-13 
[I will] not touch feelers. [I will] not stroke. [I will] spend on dry seeds [my] soul's sweetness. It may be 
found when [I am] dead. Touch this dry wood! [I] call! [I am] here! 
Alternatively, this passage maybe read: 
[Do] not touch feelers. [Do] not stroke. Spend on dry seeds [your] soul's sweetness. [Others] may find it 
when [you are] dead. Touch this dry wood! Call: [I am] here! 
No known dialect of Ant employs any verbal person except the third person singular and plural, and the 
first person plural. In this text, only the root-forms of the verbs are used; so there is no way to decide 
whether the passage was intended to be an autobiography or a manifesto. 
168 JT BUFFALO GALS 
SEEDS 14-22 
Long are the tunnels. Longer is the untunneled. No tunnel reaches the end of the untunneled. The 
untunneled goes on farther than we can go in ten days [ie., forever]. Praise! 
The mark translated "Praise!" is half of the customary! salutation "Praise the Queen!" or "Longlive the 
Queen!" or! "Huzza for the Queen!"�but the word/mark signifying} "Queen" has been omitted. 
SEEDS 23-29 
As the ant among foreign-enemy ants is killed, so the ant without ants dies, but being without ants is as 
sweet as honeydew. 
An ant intruding in a colony not its own is usually killed. Isolated from other ants it invariably dies 
within a day or so. The difficulty in this passage is the word/mark "without ants," which we take to mean 
"alone"�a concept for which no word/mark exists in Ant 
SEEDS 30-31 
Eat the eggs! Up with the Queen! 
There has already been considerable dispute over the interpretation of the phrase on Seed 31. It is an 
important question, since all the preceding seeds can be fully understood only in the light cast by this 

ultimate exhortation. Dr. Rosbone ingeniously argues that the author, a wingless neuter-female worker, 
yearns hopelessly to be a winged male, and to found a new colony, flying upward in the nuptial flight 
with a new Queen. Though the text certainly permits such a reading our conviction is that nothing in the 
text supports it�least of all the text of the immediately 
The Author of the Acacia Seeds "^-169 
preceding seed, No. 30: "Eat the eggs!" This reading though shocking is beyond disputation. 
We venture to suggest that the confusion over Seed 31 may result from an ethnocentric interpretation of 
the word "up." To us, "up" is a "good" direction. Not so, or not necessarily so, to an ant "Up" is where 
the food comes from, to be sure; but "down" is where security, peace, and home are to be found. "Up" is 
the scorching sun; the freezing night; no shelter in the beloved tunnels; exile; death. Therefore we 
suggest that this strange author, in the solitude of her lonely tunnel, sought with what means she had to 
express the ultimate blasphemy conceivable to an ant, and that the correct reading of Seeds 30-31, in 
human terms is: 
Eat the eggs! Down with the Queen! 
The desicated body of a small worker was found beside Seed 31 when the manuscript was discovered. 
The head had been severed from the thorax, probably by the jaws of a soldier of the colony. The seeds, 
carefully arranged in a pattern resembling a musical stave, had not been disturbed. (Ants of the soldier 
caste are illiterate; thus the soldier was presumably not interested in the collection of useless seeds from 
which the edible germs had been removed.) No living ants were left in the colony, which was destroyed 
in a war with a neighboring ant-hill at some time subsequent to the death of the Author of the Acadia 
Seeds. 
�G. D'Arbay, T.R Bardol 
ANNOUNCEMENT OF AN EXPEDITION 
The extreme difficulty of reading Penguin has been very much lessened by the use of the underwater 
motion picture camera. On film it is at least possible to repeat, and to slow down, the fluid sequences of 
the script, to the point 
170 JT BUFFALO GALS 
where, by constant repetition and patient study, many elements of this most elegant and lively literature 
maybe grasped, though the nuances, and perhaps the essence, must forever elude us. 
It was Professor Duby who, by pointing out the remote affiliation of the script with Low Graylag made 
possible the first, tentative glossary of Penguin. The analogies with Dolphin which had been employed 
up to that time never proved very useful, and were often quite misleading. 

Indeed it seemed strange that a script written almost entirely in wings, neck, and air, should prove the 
key to the poetry of short-necked, flipper-winged water-writers. But we should not have found it so 
strange if we had kept in mind the fact that penguins are, despite all evidence to the contrary, birds. 
Because their script resembles Dolphin in form, we should never have assumed that it must resemble 
Dolphin in content. And indeed it does not There is, of course, the same extraordinary wit and the 
flashes of crazy humor, the inventiveness, and the inimitable grace. In all the thousands of literatures of 
the Fish stock, only a few show any humor at all, and that usually of a rather simple, primitive sort; and 
the superb gracefulness of Shark or Tarpon is utterly different from the joyous vigor of all Cetacean 
scripts. The joy, the vigor, and the humor are all shared by Penguin authors; and, indeed, by many of the 
finer Seal auteurs. The temperature of the blood is a bond. But the construction of the brain, and of the 
womb, makes a barrier! Dolphins do not lay eggs. A world of difference lies in mat simple fact 
Only when Professor Duby reminded us that penguins are birds, that they do not swim but fly in water, 
only then could the therolinguist begin to approach the sea-literature of the penguin with understanding 
only then could the 
The Author of the Acacia Seeds "^.171 
miles of recordings already on film be re-studied and, finally, appreciated. 
But the difficulty of translation is still with us. 
A satisfying degree of progress has already been made in Adelie. The difficulties of recording a group 
kinetic performance in a stormy ocean as thick as pea-soup with plankton at a temperature of 31�F are 
considerable; but the perseverance of the Ross Ice Barrier Literary Circle has been fully rewarded with 
such passages as "Under the Iceberg" from the Autumn Song�a passage now world famous in the 
rendition of Anna Serebryakova of the Leningrad Ballet. No verbal rendering can approach the felicity 
of Miss Serebryakova's version. For, quite simply, there is no way to reproduce in writing the allimportant 
multiplicity of the original text, so beautifully rendered by the full chorus of the Leningrad 
Ballet company. Indeed, what we call "translations" from the Adelie�or from any group kinetic text� 
are, to put it bluntly, mere notes�libretto without the opera. The ballet version is the true translation. 
Nothing in words can be complete. 
I therefore suggest, though the suggestion may well be greeted with frowns of anger or with hoots of 
laughter, that for the therolinguist�as opposed to the artist and the amateur�the kinetic sea-writings of 
Penguin are the least promising field of study: and, further, that Adelie, for all its charm and relative 
simplicity, is a less promising field of study than is Emperor. 
Emperor!�I anticipate my colleagues' response to this suggestion. Emperor! The most difficult, the 
most remote, of all the dialects of Penguin! The language of which Professor Duby himself remarked, 
"The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Anartica 

itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us." 
172 JT BUFFALO GALS 
Maybe. I do not underestimate the difficulties: not least of which is the Imperial temperament, so much 
more reserved and aloof than that of any other penguin. But, paradoxically, it is just in this reserve that I 
place my hope. The emperor is not a solitary, but a social bird, and while on land for the breeding season 
dwells in colonies, as does the adelie; but these colonies are very much smaller and very much quieter 
than those of the adelie. The bonds between the members of an emperor colony are rather personal than 
social. The emperor is an individualist Therefore I think it almost certain that the literature of the 
emperor will prove to be composed by single authors, instead of chorally; and therefore it will be 
translatable into human speech. It will be a kinetic literature, but how different from the spatially 
extensive, rapid, multiplex choruses of sea-writing! Close analysis, and genuine transcription, will at last 
be possible. 
What! say my critics�Should we pack up and go to Cape Crozier, to the dark, to the blizzards, to the - 
60� cold, in the mere hope of recording the problematic poetry of a few strange birds who sit there, in 
the mid-winter dark, in the blizzards, in the -60� cold, on the eternal ice, with an egg on their feet? 
And my reply is, Yes. For, like Professor Duby, my instinct tells me that the beauty of that poetry is as 
unearthly as anything we shall ever find on earth. 
To those of my colleagues in whom the spirit of scientific curiosity and aesthetic risk is strong I say, 
imagine it: the ice, the scouring snow, the darkness, the ceaseless whine and scream of wind. In that 
black desolation a little band of poets crouches. They are starving; they will not eat for weeks. On the 
feet of each one, under the warm belly-feathers, rests one large egg, thus preserved from the mortal 
touch of the ice. The poets cannot hear each other; they cannot see each other. They can only feel the 
other's 
The Author of the Acacia Seeds *^- 173 
warmth. That is their poetry, that is their art Like all kinetic literatures, it is silent; unlike other kinetic 
literatures, it is all but immobile, ineffably subtle. The ruffling of a feather; the shifting of a wing; the 
touch, the slight, faint, warm touch of the one beside you. In unutterable, miserable, black solitude, the 
affirmation. In absence, presence. In death, life. 
I have obtained a sizable grant from UNESCO and have stocked an expedition. There are still four 
places open. We leave for Antarctica on Thursday. If anyone wants to come along, welcome! 
�D. Petti 
EDITORIAL BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE THEROLINGUISTICS ASSOCIATION 

What is Language? 
This question, central to the science of therolinguists, has been answered�heuristically�by the very 
existence of the science. Language is communication. That is the axiom on which all our theory and 
research rest, and from which all our discoveries derive; and the success of the discoveries testifies to 
the validity of the axiom. But to the related, yet not identical question, What is Art? we have not yet 
given a satisfactory answer. 
Tolstoy, in the book whose title is that very question, answered it firmly and clearly: Art, too, is 
communication. This answer has, I believe, been accepted without examination or criticism by 
therolinguistics. For example: Why do therolinguists study only animals? 
Why, because plants do not communicate. 
Plants do not communicate; that is a fact Therefore plants have no language; very well; that follows 
from our basic axiom. Therefore, also, plants have no art But stay! 
174 J? BUFFALO GALS 
That does not follow from the basic axiom, but only from the unexamined Tolstoyan corollary. 
What if art is not communicative? 
Or, what if some art is communicative, and some art is not? 
Ourselves animals, active, predators, we look (naturally enough) for an active, predatory, 
communicative art; and when we find it, we recognize it The development of this power of recognition 
and the skills of appreciation is a recent and glorious achievement 
But I submit that, for all the tremendous advances made by therolinguistics during the last decades, we 
are only at the beginning of our age of discovery. We must not become slaves to our own axioms. We 
have not yet lifted our eyes to the vaster horizons before us. We have not faced the almost terrifying 
challenge of the Plant 
If a non-communicative, vegetative art exists, we must re-think the very elements of our science, and 
learn a whole new set of techniques. 
For it is simply not possible to bring the critical and technical skills appropriate to the study of Weasel 
murder-mysteries, or Batrachian erotica, or the tunnel-sagas of the earthworm, to bear on the art of the 
redwood or the zucchini. 
This is proved conclusively by the failure�a noble failure�of the efforts of Dr. Srivas, in Calcutta, 
using time-lapse photography, to produce a lexicon of Sunflower. His attempt was daring, but doomed 

to failure. For his approach was kinetic�a method appropriate to the communicative arts of the tortoise, 
the oyster, and the sloth. He saw the extreme slowness of the kinesis of plants, and only that, as the 
problem to be solved. 
But the problem was far greater. The art he sought, if it exists, is a non-communicative art: and probably 
a non-kinetic one. It is possible that Time, the essential element, 
The Author of the Acacia Seeds "^.175 
matrix, and measure of all known animal art, does not enter into vegetable art at all. The plants may use 
the meter of eternity. We do not know. 
We do not know. All we can guess is that the putative Art of the Plant is entirely different from the Art 
of the Animal. What it is, we cannot say; we have not yet discovered it Yet I predict with some certainty 
that it exists, and that when it is found it will prove to be, not an action, but a reaction: not a 
communication, but a reception. It will be exactly the opposite of the art we know and recognize. It will 
be the first passive art known to us. Can we in fact know it? Can we ever understand it? 
It will be immensely difficult That is clear. But we should not despair. Remember that so late as the midtwentieth 
century, most scientists, and many artists, did not believe that even Dolphin would ever be 
comprehensible to the human brain�or worth comprehending! Let another century pass, and we may 
seem equally laughable. "Do you realize," the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, "that they 
couldn't even read Eggplant?" And they will smile at our ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and 
hike on up to read the newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pike's Peak. 
And with them, or after them, may there not come that even bolder adventurer�the first geolinguist, 
who, ignoring the delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath it the still less communicative, 
still more passive, wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic poetry of the rocks: each one a word spoken, how 
long ago, by the earth itself, in the immense solitude, the immenser community, of space. 
(1974) 
"May's Lion" 
This story was written while I was first working on the book Always Coming Home, trying to find the 
right way to get from the Napa Valley of my childhood and the present to the "Na Valley" of the book. 
The conventional literary techniques for connecting the actual and the fictional, fact and imagination, 
and then concealing the connection, wouldn't serve my purposes at all. In this story, in a kind of 
trickster's disgust with trickery, I made the link out in plain sight, obviously, deliberately. Doing that, 
and seeing what kind of story it made, I began to see how to write the book. The story, however, didn't 
fit into the book. May belongs where she belonged, in her own house; she helped me get to my Valley, 
but never had any intention of going there herself. It is only the lion who crosses between history and 
dream unchanged. So in this story I follow the lion's tracks, not Coyote's. 

May's Lion 
JIM REMEMBERS IT AS A BOBCAT, and he was May's nephew, and ought to know. It probably was 
a bobcat. I don't think May would have changed her story, though you can't trust a good story-teller not 
to make the story suit herself, or get the facts to fit the story better. Anyhow she told it to us more than 
once, because my mother and I would ask for it; 
179 
180 JT BUFFALO GALS 
and the way I remember it, it was a mountain lion. And the way I remember May telling it is sitting on 
the edge of the irrigation tank we used to swim in, cement rough as a lava flow and hot in the sun, the 
long cracks tarred over. She was an old lady then with a long Irish upper lip, kind and wary and balky. 
She liked to come sit and talk with my mother while I swam; she didn't have all that many people to talk 
to. She always had chickens, in the chickenhouse very near the back door of the farmhouse, so the whole 
place smelled pretty strong of chickens, and as long as she could she kept a cow or two down in the old 
barn by the creek. The first of May's cows I remember was Pearl, a big handsome Hoi-stein who gave 
fourteen or twenty-four or forty gallons or quarts of milk at a milking whichever is right for a prize 
milker. Pearl was beautiful in my eyes when I was four or five years old; I loved and admired her. I 
remember how excited I was, how I reached upward to them, when Pearl or the workhorse Prince, for 
whom my love amounted to worship, would put an immense and sensitive muzzle through the threestrand 
fence to whisk a cornhusk from my fearful hand; and then the munching and the sweet breath and 
the big nose would be at the barbed wire again: the offering is acceptable.... After Pearl there was Rosie, 
a purebred Jersey. May got her either cheap or free because she was a runt calf, so tiny that May brought 
her home on her lap in the back of the car, like a fawn. And Rosie always looked like she had some deer 
in her. She was a lovely, clever little cow and even more willful than old May. She often chose not to 
come in to be milked. We would hear May calling and then see her trudging across our lower pasture 
with the bucket, going to find Rosie wherever Rosie had decided to be milked today on the wild hills she 
had to roam in, a hundred acres of our and Old Jim's land. Then May had a fox terrier named Pinky, who 
yipped and nipped and turned me against fox terriers for life, but he was long 
May's Lion \t-181 
gone when the mountain lion came; and the black cats who lived in the barn kept discreetly out of the 
story. As a matter of fact now I think of it the chickens weren't in it either. It might have been quite 
different if they had been. May had quit keeping chickens after old Mrs. Walter died. It was just her all 
alone there, and Rosie and the cats down in the barn, and nobody else within sight or sound of the old 
farm. We were in our house up the hill only in the summer, and Jim lived in town, those years. What 
time of year it was I don't know, but I imagine the grass still green or just turning gold. And May was in 
the house, in the kitchen, where she lived entirely unless she was asleep or outdoors, when she heard this 
noise. 

Now you need May herself, sitting skinny on the edge of the irrigation tank, seventy or eighty or ninety 
years old, nobody knew how old May was and she had made sure they couldn't find out, opening her 
pleated lips and letting out this noise�a huge, awful yowl, starting soft with a nasal hum and rising 
slowly into a snarling gargle that sank away into a sobbing purr.... It got better every time she told the 
story. 
"It was some meow," she said. 
So she went to the kitchen door, opened it, and looked out Then she shut the kitchen door and went to 
the kitchen window to look out, because there was a mountain lion under the fig tree. 
Puma, cougar, catamount; Felis concdlor, the shy, secret, shadowy lion of the New World, four or five 
feet long plus a yard of black-tipped tail, weighs about what a woman weighs, lives where the deer live 
from Canada to Chile, but always shyer, always fewer; the color of dry leaves, dry grass. 
There were plenty of deer in the Valley in the forties, but no mountain lion had been seen for decades 
anywhere near where people lived. Maybe way back up in the canyons; but Jim, who hunted, and knew 
every deer-trail in 
182 JT BUFFALO GALS 
the hills, had never seen a lion. Nobody had, except May, now, alone in her kitchen. 
"I thought maybe it was sick," she told us. "It wasn't acting right I don't think a lion would walk right 
into the yard like that if it was feeling well. If I'd still had the chickens it'd be a different story maybe! 
But it just walked around some, and then it lay down there," and she points between the fig tree and the 
decrepit garage. "And then after a while it kind of meowed again, and got up and come into the shade 
right there." The fig tree, planted when the house was built, about the time May was born, makes a great, 
green, sweet-smelling shade. "It just laid there looking around. It wasn't well," says May. 
She had lived with and looked after animals all her life; she had also earned her living for years as a 
nurse. 
"Well, I didn't know exactly what to do for it So I put out some water for it It didn't even get up when I 
come out the door. I put the water down there, not so close to it that we'd scare each other, see, and it 
kept watching me, but it didn't move. After I went back in it did get up and tried to drink some water. 
Then it made that kind of meowowow. I do believe it come here because it was looking for help. Or just 
for company, maybe." 
The afternoon went on, May in the kitchen, the lion under the fig tree. 
But down in the barnyard by the creek was Rosie the cow. Fortunately the gate was shut, so she could 

not come wandering up to the house and meet the lion; but she would be needing to be milked, come six 
or seven o'clock, and that got to worrying May. She also worried how long a sick mountain lion might 
hang around, keeping her shut in the house. May didn't like being shut in. 
"I went out a time or two, and went shoo!" 
Eyes shining amidst fine wrinkles, she flaps her thin arms at the lion. "Shoo! Go on home now!" 
May's Lion^. 183 
But the silent wild creature watches her with yellow eyes and does not stir. 
"So when I was talking to Miss Macy on the telephone, she said it might have rabies, and I ought to call 
the sheriff. I was uneasy then. So finally I did that, and they come out, those county police, you know. 
Two carloads." 
Her voice is dry and quiet 
"I guess there was nothing else they knew how to do. So they shot it" 
She looks off across the field Old Jim, her brother, used to plow with Prince the horse and irrigate with 
the water from this tank. Now wild oats and blackberry grow there. In another thirty years it will be a 
rich man's vineyard, a tax write-off. 
"He was seven feet long all stretched out, before they took him off. And so thin! They all said, Well, 
Aunt May, I guess you were scared there! I guess you were some scared!' But I wasn't I didn't want him 
shot. But I didn't know what to do for him. And I did need to get to Rosie." 
I have told this true story which May gave to us as truly as I could, and now I want to tell it as fiction, 
yet without taking it from her rather to give it back to her, if I can do so. It is a tiny part of the history of 
the Valley, and I want to make it part of the Valley outside history. Now the field that the poor man 
plowed and the rich man harvested lies on the edge of a little town, houses and workshops of timber and 
fieldstone standing among almond, oak, and eucalyptus trees; and now May is an old woman with a 
name that means the month of May: Rains End. An old woman with a long, wrinkled-pleated upper lip, 
she is living alone for the summer in her summer place, a meadow a mile or so up in the hills above the 
little town. Sinshan. She took her cow Rose with her, and since Rose tends to wander she keeps her on a 
long tether down by the tiny creek, and moves her 
184^BUFFALO GALS 
into fresh grass now and then. The summerhouse is what they call a nine-pole house, a mere frame of 
poles stuck in the ground�one of them is a live digger-pine sapling� with stick and matting'walls, and 
mat roof and floors. It doesn't rain in the dry season, and the roof is just for shade. But the house and its 

little front yard where Rains End has her camp stove and clay oven and matting loom are well shaded by 
a fig tree that was planted there a hundred years or so ago by her grandmother. 
Rains End herself has no grandchildren; she never bore a child, and her one or two marriages were brief 
and very long ago. She has a nephew and two grandnieces, and feels herself an aunt to all children, even 
when they are afraid of her and rude to her because she has got so ugly with old age, smelling as musty 
as a chickenhouse. She considers it natural for children to shrink away from somebody part way dead, 
and knows that when they're a little older and have got used to her they'll ask her for stories. She was for 
sixty years a member of the Doctors Lodge, and though she doesn't do curing any more people still ask 
her to help with nursing sick children, and the children come to long for the kind, authoritative touch of 
her hands when she bathes them to bring a fever down, or changes a dressing or combs out bed-tangled 
hair with witch hazel and great patience. 
So Rains End was just waking up from an early afternoon nap in the heat of the day, under the matting 
roof, when she heard a noise, a huge, awful yowl that started soft with a nasal hum and rose slowly into 
a snarling gargle that sank away into a sobbing purr.... And she got up and looked out from the open side 
of the house of sticks and matting, and saw a mountain lion under the fig tree. She looked at him from 
her house; he looked at her from his. 
And this part of the story is much the same: the old woman; the lion; and, down by the creek, the cow. 
May's Lion "^.185 
It was hot Crickets sang shrill in the yellow grass on all the hills and canyons, in all the chaparral. Rains 
End filled a bowl with water from an unglazed jug and came slowly out of the house. Halfway between 
the house and the lion she set the bowl down on the dirt She turned and went back to the house. 
The lion got up after a while and came and sniffed at the water. He lay down again with a soft, querulous 
groan, almost like a sick child, and looked at Rains End with the yellow eyes that saw her in a different 
way than she had ever been seen before. 
She sat on the matting in the shade of the open part of her house and did some mending When she 
looked up at the lion she sang under her breath, tunelessly; she wanted to remember the Puma Dance 
Song but could only remember bits of it, so she made a song for the occasion: You are there, lion. You 
are there, lion.... 
As the afternoon wore on she began to worry about going down to milk Rose. Unmilked, the cow would 
start tugging at her tether and making a commotion. That was likely to upset the lion. He lay so close to 
the house now that if she came out that too might upset him, and she did not want to frighten him or to 
become frightened of him. He had evidently come for some reason, and it behoved her to find out what 
the reason was. Probably he was sick; his corning so close to a human person was strange, and people 
who behave strangely are usually sick or in some kind of pain. Sometimes, though, they are spiritually 
moved to act strangely. The lion might be a messenger, or might have some message of his own for her 

or her townspeople. She was more used to seeing birds as messengers; the four-footed people go about 
their own business. But the lion, dweller in the Seventh House, comes from the place dreams come from. 
Maybe she did not understand. Maybe 
186 JT BUFFALO GALS 
someone else would understand. She could go over and tell Valiant and her family, whose summerhouse 
was in Gah-heya meadow, farther up the creek; or she could go over to Buck's, on Baldy Knoll. But 
there were four or five adolescents there, and one of them might come and shoot the lion, to boast that 
he'd saved old Rains End from getting clawed to bits and eaten. 
Moooooo! said Rose, down by the creek, reproachfully. 
The sun was still above the southwest ridge, but the branches of pines were across it and the heavy heat 
was out of it, and shadows were welling up in the low fields of wild oats and blackberry. 
Moooooo! said Rose again, louder. 
The lion lifted up his square, heavy head, the color of dry wild oats, and gazed down across the pastures. 
Rains End knew from that weary movement that he was very ill. He had come for company in dying that 
was all. 
"Ill come back, lion," Rains End sang tunelessly. "lie still. Be quiet 111 come back soon." Moving softly 
and easily, as she would move in a room with a sick child, she got her milking pail and stool, slung the 
stool on her back with a woven strap so as to leave a hand free, and came out of the house. The lion 
watched her at first very tense, the yellow eyes firing up for a moment, but then put his head down again 
with that little grudging, groaning sound. "I'll come back, lion," Rains End said. She went down to the 
creekside and milked a nervous and indignant cow. Rose could smell lion, and demanded in several 
ways, all eloquent, just what Rains End intended to do? Rains End ignored her questions and sang 
milking songs to her: "Su bonny, su bonny, be still my grand cow..." Once she had to slap her hard on 
the hip. "Quit that, you old fool! Get over! I am not going to untie you and have you walking into 
trouble! I won't let him come down this way." 
She did not say how she planned to stop him. 
May's Lion \Ll87 
She retethered Rose where she could stand down in the creek if she liked. When she came back up the 
rise with the pail of milk in hand, the lion had not moved. The sun was down, the air above the ridges 
turning clear gold. The yellow eyes watched her, no light in them. She came to pour milk into the lion's 
bowl. As she did so, he all at once half rose up. Rains End started, and spilled some of the milk she was 
pouring. "Shoo! Stop that!" she whispered fiercely, waving her skinny arm at the lion. "Lie down now! 
I'm afraid of you when you get up, can't you see that, stupid? Lie down now, lion. There you are. Here I 

am. It's all right You know what you're doing" Talking softly as she went, she returned to her house of 
stick and matting There she sat down as before, in the open porch, on the grass mats. 
The mountain lion made the grumbling sound, ending with a long sigh, and let his head sink back down 
on his paws. 
Rains End got some combread and a tomato from the pantry box while there was still daylight left to see 
by, and ate slowly and neatly. She did not offer the lion food. He had not touched the milk, and she 
thought he would eat no more in the House of Earth. 
From time to time as the quiet evening darkened and stars gathered thicker overhead she sang to the lion. 
She sang the five songs of Going Westward to the Sunrise, which are sung to human beings dying She 
did not know if it was proper and appropriate to sing these songs to a dying mountain lion, but she did 
not know his songs. 
Twice he also sang once a quavering moan, like a house-cat challenging another torn to battle, and once 
a long sighing purr. 
Before the Scorpion had swung clear of Sinshan Mountain, Rains End had pulled her heavy shawl 
around herself in case the fog came in, and had gone sound asleep in the porch of her house. 
188 J/ BUFFALO GALS 
She woke with the grey light before sunrise. The lion was a motionless shadow, a little farther from the 
trunk of the fig tree than he had been the night before. As the light grew, she saw that he had stretched 
himself out full length. She knew he had finished his dying, and sang the fifth song the last song in a 
whisper, for him: 
The doors of the Four Houses 
are open. 
Surely they are open. 
Near sunrise she went to milk Rose, and to wash in the creek. When she came back up to the house she 
went closer to the lion, though not so close as to crowd him, and stood for a long time looking at him 
stretched out in the long, tawny, delicate light "As thin as I am!" she said to Valiant, when she went up 
to Gahheya later in the morning to tell the story and to ask help carrying the body of the lion off where 
the buzzards and coyotes could clean it 
It's still your story, Aunt May; it was your lion. He came to you. He brought his death to you, a gift; but 
the men with the guns won't take gifts, they think they own death already. And so they took from you 
the honor he did you, and you felt that loss. I wanted to restore it But you don't need it. You followed the 

lion where he went, years ago now. 
(1983-87) 
XI 
Rilke's "Eighth Duino Elegy" and "She Unnames Them" 
/ learned most of my German from Mark Twain. My translation of Rise's poem was achieved by 
chewing up and digesting other translations�C.F. Mclntyre's still seems the truest to me�and then 
using a German dictionary and a lot of nerve. The "Elegy" is the poem about animals that I have loved 
the longest and learned the most from. 
It is followed by the story that had to come Tost in this book because it states (equivocally, of course) 
whose side (so long as sides must be taken) I am on and what the consequences (maybe) are. 
The Eighth Elegy 
(From "The Duino Elegies" of Rainer Maria Rilke) 
With all its gaze the animal 
sees openness. Only our eyes are 
as if reversed, set like traps 
all around its free forthgoing. 
What is outside, we know from the face 
of the animal only; for we turn even the 
youngest child 
around and force it to see all forms backwards, not the openness so deep in the beast's gaze. Free from 
death. 
191 
192-^BUFFALO GALS 
Only we see that The free animal 

has its dying always behind it 
and God in front of it, and its way 
is the eternal way, as the spring flowing. 
Never, not for a moment, do we have 
pure space before us, where the flowers 
endlessly open. Always it's world 
and never nowhere-nothing-not, 
that pure unoverseen we breathe 
and know without desiring forever. So a child, 
losing itself in that silence, has to be 
jolted back. Or one dies, and is. 
For close to death we don't see death, 
but stare outward, maybe with the beast's great gaze. 
And lovers, if it weren't for the other 
getting in the way, come very close to it, amazed, 
as if it had been left open by mistake, 
behind the beloved�but nobody 
gets all the way, and it's all world again. 
Facing Creation forever, all we see 
in it is a mirror-image of the free 
in our own dark shadow. Or an animal, 
a dumb beast, stares right through us, peaceably. 

This is called Destiny: being face to face, 
and never anything but face to face. 
Were this consciousness of ours shared by the beast, that in its certainty approaches us in a different 
direction, it would take us with it on its way. But its being is to it unending, uncontained, no glimpse of 
its condition, pure, as is its gaze. And where we see the Future, it sees all, and itself in all, and healed 
forever. 
The Eighth Elegy ^ 193 
Yet in the warm, watching animal 
is the care and weight of a great sadness. 
For it bears always, as we bear, 
and are borne down by, memory. 
As if not long ago all we yearn for 
had been closer to us, truer, and the bond 
endlessly tender. Here all is distance, 
there it was breathing After the first home, 
the second is duplicitous, drafty. 
O happiness of tiny creatures 
that stay forever in the womb that bears them! 
O fly's joy, buzzing still within, 
even on its mating-day! For womb is all. 
And look at the half-certainty of birds, 
that from the start know almost both, 
like a soul of the Etruscans 

in the body shut inside the tomb, 
its own resting figure as the lid. 
And how distressed the womb-born are 
when they must fly! As if scared 
by themselves, they jerk across the air, as a crack 
goes through a cup: so the bat's track 
through the porcelain of twilight 
And we, onlookers, always, everywhere, 
our face turned to it all and never from! 
It overfills us. We control it It breaks down. 
We re-control it, and break down ourselves. 
Who turned us round like this, so that 
no matter what we do, we have the air 
of somebody departing? As a traveller 
on the last hill, for the last time seeing 
all the home valley, turns, and stands, and lingers� 
so we live forever taking leave. 
194 JT 
She Unnames Them 
MOST OF THEM ACCEPTED NAMELESSNESS with the perfect indifference with which they had so 
long accepted and ignored their names. Whales and dolphins, seals and sea otters consented with 
particular grace and alacrity, sliding into anonymity as into their element A faction of yaks, however, 
protested. They said that "yak" sounded right, and that almost everyone who knew they existed called 

them that Unlike the ubiquitous creatures such as rats or fleas who had been called by hundreds or 
thousands of different names since Babel, the yaks could truly say, they said, that they had a name. They 
discussed the matter all summer. The councils of the elderly females finally agreed that though the name 
might be useful to others, it was so redundant from the yak point of view that they never spoke it 
themselves, and hence might as well dispense with it After they presented the argument in this light to 
their bulls, a full consensus was delayed only by the onset of severe early blizzards. Soon after the 
beginning of the thaw their agreement was reached and the designation "yak" was returned to the donor. 
Among the domestic animals, few horses had cared what anybody called them since the failure of Dean 
Swift's attempt to name them from their own vocabulary. Cattle, sheep, swine, asses, mules, and goats, 
along with chickens, geese, and turkeys, all agreed enthusiastically to give their names back to the 
people to whom�as they put it�they belonged. 
A couple of problems did come up with pets. The cats of course steadfastly denied ever having had any 
name other than those self-given, unspoken, effanineffably personal 
She Unnames Them \L 195 
names which, as the poet named Eliot said, they spend long hours daily contemplating�though none of 
the con-templators has ever admitted that what they contemplate is in fact their name, and some 
onlookers have wondered if the object of that meditative gaze might not in fact be the Perfect, or 
Platonic, Mouse. In any case it is a moot point now. It was with the dogs, and with some parrots, 
lovebirds, ravens, and mynahs that the trouble arose. These verbally talented individuals insisted that 
their names were important to them, and flatly refused to part with them. But as soon as they understood 
that the issue was precisely one of individual choice, and that anybody who wanted to be called Rover, 
or Froufrou, or Polly, or even Birdie in the personal sense, was perfectly free to do so, not one of them 
had the least objection to parting with the lower case (or, as regards German creatures, uppercase) 
generic appellations poodle, parrot dog, or bird, and all the Linnaean qualifiers that had trailed along 
behind them for two hundred years like tin cans tied to a tail. 
The insects parted with their names in vast clouds and swarms of ephemeral syllables buzzing and 
stinging and humming and flitting and crawling and tunneling away. 
As for the fish of the sea, their names dispersed from them in silence throughout the oceans like faint, 
dark blurs of cuttlefish ink, and drifted off on the currents without a trace. 
None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or 
trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while 
in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a 
clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction 
that many of us felt, the desire to smell one another's smells, feel or rub or caress one another's scales or 
skin or 

196 JT BUFFALO GALS 
feathers or fur, taste one another's blood or flesh, keep one another warm,�that attraction was now all 
one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food. 
This was more or less the effect I had been after. It was somewhat more powerful than I had anticipated, 
but I could not now, in all conscience, make an exception for myself. I resolutely put anxiety away, went 
to Adam, and said, 'You and your father lent me this�gave it to me, actually. It's been really useful, but 
it doesn't exactly seem to fit very well lately. But thanks very much! It's really been very useful." 
It is hard to give back a gift without sounding peevish or ungrateful, and I did not want to leave him with 
that impression of me. He was not paying much attention, as it happened, and said only, "Put it down 
over there, OK?" and went on with what he was doing. 
One of my reasons for doing what I did was that talk was getting us nowhere; but all the same I felt a 
little let down. I had been prepared to defend my decision. And I thought that perhaps when he did 
notice he might be upset and want to talk. I put some things away and fiddled around a little, but he 
continued to do what he was doing and to take no notice of anything else. At last I said, "Well, goodbye, 
dear. I hope the garden key turns up." 
He was fitting parts together, and said without looking around, "OK, fine, dear. When's dinner?" 
"I'm not sure," I said. "I'm going now. With the�" I hesitated, and finally said, "With them, you know," 
and went on. In fact I had only just then realized how hard it would have been to explain myself. I could 
not chatter away as I used to do, taking it all for granted. My words now must be as slow, as new, as 
single, as tentative as the steps I took going down the path away from the house, between the darkbranched, 
tall dancers motionless against the winter shining. 
(1985) 
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Ursula K. Le Guin does hear the animals' voices, and as she shows us in this luminous collection of one 
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the title, Buffalo Gals, a child survives a plane crash and enters the Dream Time of primitive myths, 
where the coyote knows secrets about that world-and this one. In other stories we journey further into 
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Ursula K. Le Guin is pne of America's best storytellers, and here accompanied by the author's candid 

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-Mythpnnt 

IN THE TENTH YEAR�THE DAY OF JUDGMENT 
The Earth colony of Landin had been stranded on distant Eltanin for ten years. But ten of Eltanin's years 
were six hundred Terrestrial years, and the lonely and dwindling human settlement was beginning to feel 
the strain. 
Every winter�a season which lasted for fifteen of our years�the Earthman had neighbors. These were 
the hu-manoid hilfs, a nomadic people who only settled down when they burrowed in for the cruel long 
cold spell. Yet the hilfs feared the Earthmen, whom they thought of as witches and called the farborns. 
And their fear kept the lost colony lonely. 
But hilfs and farborns had common enemies: the hordes of ravaging barbarians called Gaals and the 
eerie preying snowghouls. And in the terrible winter of the Tenth Year, the only hope of hilf and farborn 
was to join forces or be annihilated. 
URSULA KROEBER LE GUIN, daughter of A. L. Kroe-ber (anthropologist) and Theodora Kroeber 
(author), was born in Berkeley, California in 1929. She attended college at Radcliffe and Columbia, and 
married C. A. LeGuin hi Paris in 1951. The LeGuins and their three children live in Portland, Oregon. 
OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR: 
CITY OF ILLUSION 
ROCANNON'S WORLD 
A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA 
and 
THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, which has won both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award as 
the best science fiction novel of the year. 
All are published by ACE BOOKS. 
ace books 
A Division of Charter Communications Inc. 
1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036 
CHAPTER ONE: A Handful of Darkness 

PLANET OF EXILE 
Copyright �, 1966, by Ursula K. LeGuin 
An Ace Book. All Rights Reserved. 
First Ace printing: October, 1966 
Second Ace printing: May, 1971 
Third Ace printing: March, 1973 
Printed in U.S.A. 
IN THE LAST DAYS of the last moonphase of Autumn a wind blew from the northern ranges through 
the dying forests of Askatevar, a cold wind that smelled of smoke and snow. Slight and shadowy as a 
wild animal in her light furs, the girl Rolery slipped through the woods, through the storming of dead 
leaves, away from the walls that stone by stone were rising on the hillside of Tevar and from the busy 
fields of the last harvest. She went alone and no one called after her. She followed a faint path that led 
west, scored and rescored in grooves by the passing southward of the footroots, choked in places by 
fallen trunks or huge drifts of leaves. 
Where the path forked at the foot of the Border Ridge she went on straight, but before she had gone ten 
steps she turned back quickly towards a pulsing rustle that approached from behind. 
A runner came down the northward track, bare feet beating in the surf of leaves, the long string that tied 
his hair whipping behind him. From the north he came at a steady, pounding, lung-bursting pace, and 
never glanced at Rolery among the trees but pounded past and was gone. The wind blew him on his way 
to Tevar with his news� storm, disaster, winter, war . . . Incurious, Rolery turned and followed her own 
evasive path, which zigzagged upr
PLANET OF EXILE 
ward among the great, dead, groaning trunks until at last on the ridge-top she saw sky break clear before 
her, and beneath the sky the sea. 
The dead forest had been cleared from the west face of the ridge. Sitting in the shelter of a huge stump, 
she could look out on the remote and radiant west, the endless gray reaches of the tidal plain, and, a little 
below her and to the right, walled and red-roofed on its sea-cliffs, the city of the farborns. 
High, bright-painted stone houses jumbled window below window and roof below roof down the 

slanting cliff-top to the brink. Outside the walls and beneath the cliffs where they ran lower south of the 
town were miles of pas-tureland and fields, all dyked and terraced, neat as patterned carpets. From the 
city wall at the brink of the cliff, over dykes and dunes and straight out over the beach and the slickshining 
tidal sands for half a mile, striding on immense arches of stone, a causeway went, linking the 
city to a strange black island among the sands. A sea-stack, it jutted up black and black-shadowed from 
the sleek planes and shining levels of the sands, grim rock, obdurate, the top of it arched and towered, a 
carving more fantastic than even wind or sea could make. Was it a house, a statue, a fort, a funeral 
cairn?-What black skill had hollowed it out and built the incredible bridge, back in timepast when the 
farborns were mighty and made war? Rolery had never paid much heed to the vague tales of witchcraft 
that went with mention of the farborns, but now looking at that black place on the sands she saw that it 
was strange�-the first thing truly strange to her that she had ever seen: built in a timepast that had 
nothing to do with her, by hands that were not kindred flesh and blood, imagined by alien minds. It was 
sinister, and it drew her. Fascinated, she watched a tiny figure that walked on that high causeway, 
dwarfed by its great length and height, a little dot or stroke of darkness creeping out to the black towers 
among the shining sands. 
PLANET OF EXILE 
The wind here was less cold; sunlight shone through cloud-rack in the vast west, gliding the streets and 
roofs below her. The town drew her with its strangeness, and without pausing to summon up courage or 
decision, reckless, Rolery went lightly and quickly down the mountainside and entered the high gate. 
Inside, she walked as light as ever, careless-willful, but that was mostly from pride: her heart beat hard 
as she followed the gray, perfectly flat stones of the alien street. She glanced from left to right, and right 
to left, hastily, at the tall houses all built above the ground, with sharp roofs, and windows of transparent 
stone�so that tale was true! �and at the narrow dirt-lots in front of some houses where bright-leaved 
kellem and hadun vines, crimson and orange, went climbing up the painted blue or green walls, vivid 
among all the gray and drab of the autumnal landscape. Near the eastern gate many of the houses stood 
empty, color stripping and scabbing from the stone, the glittering windows gone. But farther down the 
streets and steps the houses were lived in, and she began to pass farborns in the street. 
They looked at her. She had heard that farborns would meet one's eyes straight on, but did not put the 
story to test. At least none of them stopped her; her clothing was not unlike theirs, and some of them, she 
saw in her quick flicking glances, were not very much darker-skinned than men. But hi the faces that she 
did not look at she sensed the unearthly darkness of the eyes. 
All at once the street she walked on ended in a broad open place, spacious and level, all gold-andshadow-
streaked by the westering sun. Four houses stood about this square, houses the size of little hills, 
fronted with great rows of arches and above these with alternate gray and transparent stones. Only four 
streets led into this square and each could be shut with a gate that swung from the walls of the four great 
houses; so the square was a fort 
PLANET OF EXILE 

PLANET OF EXILE 
within a fort or a town within a town. Above it all a piece of one building stuck straight up into the air 
and towered there, bright with sunlight. 
It was a mighty place, but almost empty of people. 
In one sandy corner of the square, itself large as a field, a few farborn boys were playing. Two youths 
were having a fierce and skillful wrestling match, and a bunch of younger boys in padded coats and caps 
were as fiercely practicing cut-and-thrust with wood swords. The wrestlers were wonderful to watch, 
weaving a slow dangerous dance about each other, then engaging with deft and sudden grace. Along 
with a couple of farborns, tall and silent in their furs, Rolery stood looking on. When all at once the 
bigger wrestler went sailing head over heels to land flat on his brawny back she gave a gasp that 
coincided with his, and then laughed with surprise and admiration. "Good throw, Jonkendy!" a farborn 
near her called out, and a woman on the far side of the arena clapped her hands. Oblivious, absorbed, the 
younger boys fought on, thrusting and whacking and parrying. 
She had not known the witchfolk bred up warriors, or prized strength and skill. Though she had heard of 
their wrestling, she had always vaguely imagined them as hunched back and spiderlike in a gloomy den 
over a potter's wheel, making the delicate bits of pottery and clear-stone that found their way into the 
tents of mankind. And there were stories and rumors and scraps of tales; a hunter was "lucky as a 
farborn"; a certain kind of earth was called witch-ore because the witchfolk prized it and would trade for 
it. But scraps were all she knew. Since long before her birth the Men of Askatevar had roamed in the 
east and north of their range. She had never come with a harvest-load to the storerooms under Tevar 
Hill, so she had never been on this western border at all till this moonphase, when all the Men of the 
Range of Askatever came together with their flocks and families to build the Winter City over the buried 
granaries. She knew nothing, really, 
about the alien race, and when she became aware that the winning wrestler, the slender youth called 
Jonkendy, was staring straight into her face, she turned her head away and drew back in fear and distaste. 
He came up to her, his naked body shining black with sweat. "You come from Tevar, don't you?" he 
asked, in human speech, but sounding half the words wrong. Happy with his victory, brushing sand off 
his lithe arms, he smiled at her. 
"Yes." 
"What can we do for you here? Anything you'want?" 
She could not look at him from so close, of course, but his tone was both friendly and mocking. It was a 
boyish voice; she thought he was probably younger than she. She would not be mocked. "Yes," she said 
coofly. "I want to see that black rock on the sands." 

"Go on out. The causeway's open." 
He seemed to be trying to peer into her lowered face. She turned further from him. 
"If anybody stops you, tell them Jonkendy Li sent you," he said, "or should I go with you?" ' 
She would not even reply to this. Head high and gaze down she headed for the street that led from the 
square towards the causeway. None of these grinning black falsemen would dare think she was afraid . . . 
Nobody followed. Nobody seemed to notice her, passing her in the short street. She came to the great 
pillars of the causeway, glanced behind her, looked ahead and stopped. 
The bridge was immense, a road for giants. From up on the ridge it had looked fragile, spanning fields 
and dunes and sand with the light rhythm of its arches; but here she saw that it was wide enough for 
twenty men to walk abreast on, and led straight to the looming black gates of the tow-errock. No rail 
divided the great walkway from the gulf of air. The idea of walking out on it was simply wrong. She 
could not do it; it was not a walk for human feet. 
8
PLANET OF EXILE 
PLANET OF EXILE 
A sidestreet led her to a western gate in the city wall. She hurried past long, empty pens and byres and 
slipped out the gate, intending to go on round the walls and be off home. 
But here where the cliffs ran lower, with many stairs cut in them, the fields below lay peaceful and 
patterned in the yellow afternoon; and just across the dunes lay the wide beach, where she might find the 
long green seaflowers that women of Askatevar kept in their chests and on feast-days wreathed hi their 
hair. She smelled the queer smell of the sea. She had never walked on the sea-sands in her life. The sun 
was not low yet. She went down a cliff stairway and through the fields, over the dykes and dunes and 
ran out at last onto the flat and shining sands that went on and on out of sight to the north and west and 
south. 
Wind blew, faint sun shone. Very far ahead in the west she heard an unceasing sound, an immense, 
remote voice murmuring, lulling. Firm and level and endless, the sand lay under her feet. She ran for the 
joy of running, stopped and looked with a laugh of exhilaration at the causeway arches marching solemn 
and huge beside the tiny wavering line of her footprints, ran on again and stopped again to pick up 
silvery shells that lay half buried in the sand. Bright as a handful of colored pebbles the farborn town 
perched on the cliff-top behind her. Before she was tired of salt wind and space and solitude, she was out 
almost as far as the towerrock, which now loomed dense black between her and the sun. 

Cold lurked hi that long shadow. She shivered and set off running again to get out of the shadow, 
keeping a good long ways from the black bulk of rock. She wanted to see how low the sun was getting, 
how far she must run to see the first waves of the sea. 
Faint and deep on the wind a voice rang in her ears, calling something, calling so strangely and urgently 
that she stopped still and looked back with a qualm of dread at 
the great black island rising up out of the sand. Was the witchplace calling to her? 
On the unrailed causeway, over one of the piers that stuck down into the island rock, high and distant up 
there, a black figure stood calling to her. 
She turned and ran, then stopped and turned back. Terror grew in her. Now she wanted to run, and did 
not. The terror overcame her and she could not move hand or foot but stood shaking, a roaring in her 
ears. The witch of the black tower was weaving his spider-spell about her. Flinging out his arms he 
called again the piercing urgent words she did not understand, faint on the wind as a seabird's call, staak, 
staak! The roaring hi her ears grew and she cowered down on the sand. 
Then all at once, clear and quiet inside her head, a voice said, "Run. Get up and run. To the island� 
now, quick." And before she knew, she had got to her feet; she was running. The quiet voice spoke again 
to guide her. Unseeing, sobbing for breath, she reached black stairs cut hi the rock and began to struggle 
up them. At a turning a black figure ran to meet her. She reached up her hand and was half led, hah5 
dragged, up one more staircase, then released. She fell against the wall, for her legs would not hold her. 
The black figure caught her, helped her stand, and spoke aloud in the voice that had spoken inside her 
skull: "Look," he said, "there it comes." 
Water crashed and boiled below them with a roar that shook the solid rock. The waters parted by the 
island joined white and roaring, swept on, hissed and foamed and crashed on the long slope to the dunes, 
stilled to a rocking of bright waves. 
Rolery stood clinging to the wall, shaking. She could not stop shaking. 
"The tide comes in here just a bit faster than a man can run," the quiet voice behind her said. "And when 
it's in, it's about twenty feet deep here around the Stack. Come on 
10 
11 
PLANET OF EXILE 
up this way . . . That's why we lived out here in the old days, you see. Half of the time it's an island. 

Used to lure an enemy army out onto the sands just before the tide came in, if they didn't know much 
about the tides . . . Are you all right?" 
Rolery shrugged slightly. He did not seem to understand the gesture, so she said, "Yes." She could 
understand his speech, but he used a good many words she had never heard, and pronounced most of the 
rest wrong. "You come from Tevar?" 
She shrugged again. She felt sick and wanted to cry, but did not. Climbing the next flight of stairs cut in 
the black rock, she put her hair straight, and from its shelter glanced up for a split second sideways at the 
farborn's face. It was strong, rough, and dark, with grim, bright eyes, the dark eyes of the alien. 
"What were you doing on the sands? Didn't anyone warn you about the tide?" 
"I didn't know," she whispered. 
"Your Elders know. Or they used to last Spring when your tribe was living along the coast here. Men 
have damn short memories." What he said was harsh, but his voice was always quiet and without 
harshness. "This way now. Don't worry�the whole place is empty. It's been a long time one of you 
people set foot on the Stack . . ." 
They had entered a dark door and tunnel and come out into a room which she thought huge till they 
entered the next one. They passed through gates and courts open to the sky, along arched galleries that 
leaned far out above the sea, through rooms and vaulted halls, all silent, empty, dwelling places of the 
sea-wind. The sea rocked its wrinkled silver far below now. She felt light-headed, insubstantial. 
"Does nobody live here?" she asked hi a small voice. 
"Not now." 
"It's your Whiter City?" 
"No, we winter in the town. This was built as a fort. We 
12 
PLANET OF EXILE 
had a lot of enemies in the old Years . . . Why were you on the sands?" 
"I wanted to see ..." 
"See what?" 

"The sands. The ocean. I was hi your town first, I wanted to see . . ." 
"All right! No harm hi that." He led her through a gallery so high it made her dizzy. Through the tall, 
pointed arches crying seabirds flew. Then passing down a last narrow corridor they came out under a 
gate, and crossed a clanging bridge of swordmetal onto the causeway. 
They walked between tower and town, between sky and sea, hi silence, the wind pushing them always 
towards the right. Rolery was cold, and unnerved by the height and strangeness of the walk, by the 
presence of the dark false-man beside her, walking with her pace for pace. 
As they entered the town he said abruptly, "I won't mind-speak you again. I had to then." 
"When you said to run�" she began, then hesitated, not sure what he was talking about, or what had 
happened out on the sands. 
"I thought you were one of us," he said as if angry, and then controlled himself. "I couldn't stand and 
watch you drown. Even if you deserved to. But don't worry. I won't do it again, and it didn't give me any 
power over you. No matter what your Elders may tell you. So go on, you're free as air and ignorant as 
ever." 
His harshness was real, and it frightened Rolery. Impatient with her fear she inquired, shakily but with 
impudence, "Am I also free to come back?" 
At that the farborn looked at her. She was aware, though she could not look up at his face, that his 
expression had changed. "Yes. You are. May I know your name, daughter of Askatevar?" 
"Rolery of Wold's Kin." 
"Wold's your grandfather?�your father? He's still alive?" 
13 
PtANET OF EXILE 
"Wold closes the circle hi the Stone Pounding," she said loftily, trying to assert herself against his air of 
absolute authority. How could a farborn, a false-man, kinless and beneath law, be so grim and lordly? 
"Give him greeting from Jakob Agat Alterra. Tell him that I'll come to Tevar tomorrow to speak to him. 
Farewell, Rolery." And he put out his hand in the salute of equals so that without thinking she did the 
same, laying her open palm against his. 
Then she turned and hurried up the steep streets and steps, drawing her fur hood up over her head, 
turning from the few farborns she passed. Why did they stare in one's face so, like corpses or fish? 

Warm-blooded animals and human beings did not go staring hi one another's eyes that way. She came 
out of the landward gate with a great sense of relief, and made her quick way up the ridge in the last 
reddish sunlight, down through the dying woods, and along the path leading to Tevar. As twilight verged 
into darkness, she saw across the stubble-fields little stars of fire light from the tents encircling the 
unfinished Winter City on the hill. She hurried on towards warmth and dinner and humankind. But even 
in the big sister-tent of her Kin, kneeling by the fire and stuffing herself with stew among the womenfolk 
and children, still she felt a strangeness lingering in her mind. Closing her right hand, she seemed to hold 
against her palm a handful of darkness, where his touch had been. 
CHAPTER TWO: In the Red Tent 
"Tats SLOP'S COLD," he growled, pushing it away. Then seeing old Kerry's patient look as she took the 
bowl to reheat it, he called himself a cross old fool. But none of his wives�he had only one left�none 
of his daughters, none of the women could cook up a bowl of bhan-meal the way Shakatany had done. 
What a cook she had been, and young. . .his last young wife. And she had died, out there in the eastern 
range, died young while he went on living and living, waiting for the bitter Winter to come. 
A girl came by in a leather tunic stamped with the trifoliate mark of his Kin, a granddaughter probably. 
She looked a little like Shakatany. He spoke to her, though he did not remember her name. "Was it you 
that came in late last night, kinswoman?" 
He recognized the turn of her head and smile. She was the one he teased, the one that was indolent, 
impudent, sweet-natured, solitary; the child born out of season. What the devil was her name?" 
"I bring you a message, Eldest." 
"Whose message?" 
"He called himself by a big name�Jakat-abat-bolter-ra? I can't remember it all." 
"Alterra? That's what the farborns call their chiefs. Where did you see this man?" 
15 
PLANET OF EXILE 
PLANET OF EXILE 
in' 
"It wasn't a man, Eldest, it was a farborn. He sent greetings, and a message that he'll come today to 

Tevar to speak to the Eldest." 
"Did he, now?" said Wold, nodding a little, admiring her effrontery. "And you're his message-bearer?" 
"He chanced to speak to me . . ." 
"Yes, yes. Did you know, kinswoman, that among the Men of Pernmek Range an unwed woman who 
speaks to a farborn is ... punished?" 
"Punished how?" 
"Never mind." 
"The Pernmek men are a lot of kloob-eaters, and they shave their heads. What do they know about 
farborns, anyway? They never come to the coast. ... I heard once in some tent that the Eldest of my Kin 
had a farborn wife. In other days." 
"That was true. In other days." The girl waited, and Wold looked back, far back into another time: 
timepast, the Spring. Colors, fragrances long faded, flowers that had not bloomed for forty moonphases, 
the almost forgotten sound of a voice . . . "She was young. She died young. Before Summer ever came." 
After a while he added, "Besides, that's not the same as an unwed girl speaking to a farborn. There's a 
difference, kinswoman." 
"Why so?" 
Though impertinent, she deserved an answer. "There are several reasons, and some are better than 
others. This mainly: a farborn takes only one wife, so a true-woman marrying him would bear no sons." 
"Why would she not, Eldest?" 
"Don't women talk in the sister-tent any more? Are you all so ignorant? Because human and farborn 
can't conceive together! Did you never hear of that? Either a sterile mating or else miscarriages, misf 
ormed monsters that don't come to term. My wife, Arilia, who was farborn, died in miscarrying a child. 
Her people have no rule; their women are like men, they marry whom they like. But among Manland 
there is law: women lie with human men, marry human men, bear human children!" 
She looked a little sick and sorry. Presently, looking off at the scurry and bustle on the walls of the 
Winter City, she said, "A fine law for women who have men to lie with . . . 
She looked to be about twenty moonphases old, which meant she was the one born out of season, right 
in the middle of the Summer Fallow when children were not born. The sons of Spring would by now be 
twice or three times her age, married, remarried, prolific; the Fall-born were all children yet. But some 

Spring-born fellow would take her for third or fourth wife; there was no need for her to complain. 
Perhaps he could arrange a marriage for her, though that depended on her affiliations. "Who is your 
mother, kinswoman?" 
She looked straight at his belt-clasp and said, "Shaka-tany was my mother. Have you forgotten her?" 
"No, Rolery," he replied after a little while. "I haven't. Listen now, daughter, where did you speak to this 
Al-terra? Was his name Agat?" 
"That was part of his name." 
"So I knew his father and his father's father. He is of the kin of the woman ... the farborn we spoke of. 
He would be perhaps his sister's son or brother's son." 
"Your nephew then. My cousin," said the girl, and gave a sudden laugh. Wold also grinned at the 
grotesque logic of this affiliation. 
"I met him when I went to look at the ocean," she explained, "there on the sands. Before I saw a runner 
coming from the north. None of the women know. Was there news Is the Southing going to begin?" 
"Maybe, maybe," said Wold. He had forgotten her name again. "Run along, child, help your sisters in 
the fields there," he said, and forgetting her, and the bowl of bhan he had been waiting for, he got up 
heavily and went round his great red-painted tent to gaze at the swarming workers on the earth-houses 
and the walls of the Winter City, and be- 
16 
17 
r
PLANET OF EXILE 
yond them to the north. The northern sky this morning ! was very blue, clear, cold, over bare hills. : 
Vividly he remembered the life in those peak-roofed : warrens dug into the earth: the huddled bodies of 
a hun-dred sleepers, the old women waking and lighting the fires that sent heat and smoke into all his 
pores, the smell of boiling wintergrass, the noise, the stink, the close warmth of winter in those burrows 
under the frozen ground. And the cold cleanly stillness of the world above, wind-scoured or snowcovered, 
when he and the other young hunters ranged far from Tevar hunting the snowbirds and korio 
and the fat wespries that followed the frozen rivers^ down from the remotest north. And over there, right 
across the valley, from a patch of snowcrop there had risen up the lolling white head of a snowghoul. . . . 
And before then, before the snow and ice and white beasts of Winter, there had once before been bright 
weather like this: a bright day of golden wind and blue sky, cold above the hills. And he, no man, only a 

brat among the brats and women, looking up at flat white faces, red plumes, capes of queer, feathery 
grayish fur; voices had barked like beasts in words he did not understand, while the men of his Kin and 
the Elders of Askatevar had answered in stern voices, bidding the flat-faces go on. And before that there 
had been a man who came running from the north with the side of his face burnt and bloody, crying, 
"The Gaal, the Gaal! They came through our camp at Pekna! ..." 
Clearer than any present voice he heard that hoarse shout ring across his lifetime, the sixty moonphases 
that lay between him and that staring, listening brat, between this bright day and that bright day. Where 
was Pekna? Lost under the rains, the snows; and the thaws of Spring had washed away the bones of the 
massacred, the rotted tents, the memory, the name. 
There would be no massacres this time when the Gaal came south through the Range of Askatevar. He 
had seen to that. There was some good in outliving your tune and 
18 
PLANET OF EXILE 
remembering old evils. Not one clan or family of the Men of all this Range was left out in the 
Summerlands to be caught unawares by the Gaal or the first blizzard. They were all here. Twenty 
hundreds of them, with the little Fall-borns thick as leaves skipping about under your feet, and women 
chattering and gleaning in the fields like flocks of migratory birds, and men swarming to build up the 
houses and walls of the Winter City with the old stones on the old foundations, to hunt the last of the 
migrant beasts, to cut and store endless wood from the forests and peat from the Dry Bog, to round up 
and settle the harm in great byres and feed them until the wintergrass should begin to grow. All of them, 
in this labor that had gone on half a moonphase now, had obeyed hun, and he had obeyed the old Way of 
Man. When the Gaal came they would shut the city gates; when the blizzards came they would shut the 
earth-house doors, and they would survive till Spring. They would survive. 
He sat down on the ground behind his tent, lowering himself heavily, sticking out his gnarled, scarred 
legs into the sunlight. Small and whitish the sun looked, though the sky was flawlessly clear; it seemed 
half the size of the great sun of Summer, smaller even than the moon. "Sun shrunk to moon, cold comes 
soon . . ." The ground was damp with the long rains that had plagued them all this moonphase, and 
scored here and there with the little ruts left by the migrating footroots. What was it the girl had asked 
him�about farborns, about the runner, that was it. The fellow had come panting hi yesterday�was it 
yesterday?�with a tale of the Gaal attacking the Winter City of Tlokna, up north there near the Green 
Mountains. There was lie or panic in that tale. The Gaal never attacked stone walls. Flat-nosed 
barbarians, in their plumes and dirt, running southward like homelsss animals at the approach of Winter 
�they couldn't take a city. And anyway, Pekna was only a little hunting camp, not a walled city. The 
runner lied. It was all right. They would survive. Where was 
19 

PLANET OF EXILE 
PLANET OF EXILE 
the fool woman with his breakfast? Here, now, it was warm, here in the sun ... 
Wold's eighth wife crept up with a basket of steaming bhan, saw he was asleep, sighed grumpily, and 
crept away again to the cooking-fire. 
That afternoon when the farborn came to his tent, dour guards around him and a ragtag of leering, 
jeering children trailing behind, Wold remembered what the girl had said, laughing: "Your nephew, my 
cousin." So he heaved himself up and stood to greet the farborn with averted face and hand held out in 
the greeting of equals. 
As an equal the alien greeted him, unhesitating. They had always that arrogance, that air of thinking 
themselves as good as men, whether or not they really believed it. This fellow was tall, well-made, still 
young; he walked like a chief. Except for his darkness and his dark, unearthly eyes, he might have been 
thought to be human. 
"I am Jakob Agat, Eldest." 
"Be welcome in my tent and the tents of my Kin, Al-terra." 
"I hear with my heart," the farborn said, making Wold grin a little; he had not heard anybody say that 
since his father's tune. It was strange how farborns always remembered old ways, digging up things 
buried in timepast. How could this young fellow know a phrase that only Wold and perhaps a couple of 
the other oldest men of Tevar remembered? It was part of the farborns' strangeness, which was called 
witchery, and which made people fear the dark folk. But Wold had never feared them. 
"A noblewoman of your Kin dwelt in my tents, and I walked in the streets of your city many times in 
Spring. I remember this. So I say that no man of Tevar will break the peace between our people while I 
live." 
"No man of Landin will break it while I live." 
The old chief had been moved by his little speech as he made it; there were tears in his eyes, and he sat 
down on his chest of painted hide clearing his throat and blinking. 
Agat stood erect, black-cloaked, dark eyes in a dark face. 
� The young hunters who guarded him fidgeted, children peered whispering and shoving hi the open 
side of the tent. With one gesture Wold blew them all away. The tentside was lowered, old Kerly lit the 
tentfire and scurried out 

, again, and he was alone with the alien. "Sit down," he said. Agat did not sit down. He said, "I listen," 
and stood there. If Wold did not ask him to be seated in front of the other humans, he would not be 
seated when there were none to see. Wold did not think all this nor decide upon it, he merely sensed it 
through a skin made sensitive by a long lifetime of leading and controlling people. 
He sighed and said, "Wife!" in his cracked bass voice. Old Kerly reappeared, staring. "Sit down," Wold 
said to Agat, who sat down crosslegged by the fire. "Go away," 
� Wold growled to his wife, who vanished. 
Silence. Elaborately and laboriously, Wold undid the 
; fastenings of a small leather bag that hung from the waist- 
\ strap of his tunic, extracted a tiny lump of solidified gesin- 
| oil, broke from it a still tinier scrap, replaced the lump, re- 
'� tied the bag, and laid the scrap on a hot coal at the edge of 
the fire. A little curl of bitter greenish smoke went up; 
; Wold and the alien both inhaled deeply and closed their 
I eyes. Wold leaned back against the big pitch-coated urine 
basket and said, "I listen." 
"Eldest, we have had news from the north." "So have we. There was a runner yesterday." Was it 
yesterday?" 1 "Did he speak of the Winter City at Tlokna?" 
The old man sat looking into a fire a while, breathing deep as if to get a last whiff of the gesin, chewing 
the ; inside of his lips, his face (as he well knew) dull as a piece of wood, blank, senile. 
"I'd rather not be the bearer of ill news," the alien said in his quiet, grave voice. 
"You aren't. We've heard it already. It is very hard. Al-terra, to know the truth in stories that come from 
far away, 
20 
21 

PLANET OF EXILE 
from other tribes in other ranges. It's eight days' journey even for a runner from Tlokna to Tevar, twice 
that long with tents and hann. Who knows? The gates of Tevar will be ready to shut, when the Southing 
comes by. And you in your city that you never leave, surely your gates need no mending?" 
"Eldest, it will take very strong gates this time. Tlonka had walls, and gates, and warriors. Now it has 
none. This is no rumor. Men of Landin were there, ten days ago; they've been watching the borders for 
the first Gaal. But the Gaal are coming all at once�" 
"Alterra, I listen . . . Now you listen. Men sometimes get frightened and run away before the enemy ever 
comes. We hear this tale and that tale too. But I am old. I have seen autumn twice, I have seen Winter 
come, I have seen the Gaal come south. I will tell you the truth." 
"I listen," the alien said. 
"The Gaal live in the north beyond the farthest ranges of men who speak our language. They have great 
grassy Summerlands there, so the story says, beneath mountains that have rivers of ice on their tops. 
After Mid-Autumn the cold and the beasts of the snow begin to come down into then-lands from the 
farthest north where it is always Whiter, and like our beasts the Gaal move south. They bring their tents, 
but build no cities and save no grain. They come through Tevar Range while the stars of the Tree are 
rising at sunset and before the Snowstar rises, at the turn from Fall to Winter. If they find families 
traveling unprotected, hunting camps, unguarded flocks or fields, they'll kill and steal. If they see a 
Whiter City standing built, and warriors on its walls, they go by waving their spears and yelling, and we 
shoot a few darts into the backsides of the last ones. . . . They go on and on, and stop only somewhere 
far south of here; some men say it's warmer where they spend the Winter�who knows? But that is the 
Southing. I know. I've seen it, Alterra, and seen them return north again in the thaws when the forests are 
growing. They don't attack 
PLANET OF EXILE 
stone cities. They're like water, water running and noisy, j but the stone divides it and is not moved. 
Tevar is stone." I The young farborn sat with bowed head, thinking, long j enough that Wold could 
glance directly at his face for a ' moment. 
"All you say, Eldest, is truth, entire truth, and has always been true in past Years. But this is ... a new 
time ... I am a leader among my people, as you are of yours. [ I come as one chief to another, seeking 
help. Believe me� listen to me, our people must help each other. There is a great man among the Gaal, 
a leader, they call him Kub-ban or Kobban. He has united all their tribes and made an i army of them. 
The Gaal aren't stealing stray hann along : their way, they're besieging and capturing the Whiter 
Cities . in all the Ranges along the coast, killing the Spring-born men, enslaving the women, leaving 
Gaal warriors hi each city to hold and rule it over the Whiter. Come Spring, when the Gaal come north 

again, they'll stay; these lands will be then: lands�these forests and fields and Summerlands and i 
cities and all their people�what's left of them . . ." 
The old man stared aside a while and then said very 
heavily, in anger, "You talk, I don't listen. You say my 
people will be beaten, killed, enslaved. My people are men 
i and you're a farborn. Keep your black talk for your own 
black fate!" 
"If men are in danger, we're in worse danger. Do you know how many of us there are in Landin now, 
Eldest? Less than two thousand." 
; "So few? What of the other towns? Your people lived on t the coast to the north, when I was 
young." ' "Gone. The survivors came to us." 
"War? Sickness? You have no sickness, you farborns." 
"It's hard to survive on a world you weren't made for," 
Agat said with grim brevity. "At any rate we're few, we're 
weak hi numbers: we ask to be the allies of Tevar when 
the Gaal come. And they'll come within thirty days." 
"Sooner than that, if there are Gaal at Tlonka now. 
22 
23 
PLANET OF EXILE 
They're late already, the snow will fall any day. They'll be hurrying." 
"They're not hurrying, Eldest. They're coming slowly because they're coming all together�fifty, sixty, 
seventy thousand of them!" 
Suddenly and most horribly, Wold saw what he said: saw the endless horde filing rank behind rank 

through the moun tain passes, led by a tall slab-faced chief, saw the men of Tlonka�or was it of Tevar? 
�lying slaughtered under the broken walls of their city, ice forming in splinters over puddled blood. ... 
He shook his head to clear out these visions. What had come over him? He sat silent a while chewing the 
inside of his lips. 
"Well, I have heard you, Alterra." 
"Not entirely, Eldest." This was barbarian rudeness, but the fellow was an alien, and after all a chief of 
his own kind. Wold let him go ahead. "We have time to prepare. If the men of Askatevar and the men of 
Allakskat and of Pern-mek will make alliance, and accept our help, we can make an army of our own. If 
we wait in force, ready for the Gaal, on the north border of your three Ranges, then the whole Southing 
rather than face that much strength might turn aside and go down the mountain trails to the east. Twice 
in earlier Years our records say they took that eastern way. Since it's late and getting colder, and there's 
not much game left, the Gaal may turn aside and hurry on if they meet men ready to fight. My guess is 
that Kubban has no real tactic other than surprise and multitude. We can turn him." 
"The men of Pernmek and Allakskat are in their Winter Cities now, like us. Don't you know the Way of 
Men yet? There are no battles fought hi Winter!" 
"Tell that law to the Gaal, Eldest! Take your own counsel, but believe my words!" The farborn rose, 
impelled to bis feet by the intensity of his pleading and warning. Wold felt sorry for him, as he often did 
for young men, who have not seen how passion and plan over and over are 
PLANET OF EXILE 
wasted, how their lives and acts are wasted between desire and fear. 
"I have heard you," he said with stolid kindliness. "The Elders of my people will hear what you've said." 
"Then may I come tomorrow to hear�" "Tomorrow, next day . . ." "Thirty days, Eldest! Thirty days at 
most!" "Alterra, the Gaal will come, and will go. The Winter will come and will not go. What good for a 
victorious warrior to return to an unfinished house, when the earth turns to ice? When we're ready for 
Winter we'll worry about the Gaal. . . , Now sit down again." He dug into his pouch again for a second 
bit of gesin for their closing whiff. "Was your father Agat also? I knew him when he was young. And 
one of my worthless daughters told me that she met you while she was walking on the sands." 
The farborn looked up rather quickly, and then said, "Yes, so we met. On the sands between tides." 
24 
25 
CHAPTER THREE: The True Name of the Sun 

WHAT CAUSED the tides along this coast, the great diurnal swinging in and swinging out of fifteen to 
fifty feet of water? Not one of the Elders of the City of Tevar could answer that question. Any child in 
Landin could: the moon caused the tides, the pull of the moon. . . . 
And moon and earth circled each other, a stately circle taking four hundred days to complete, a 
moonphase. And together the double planet circled the sun, a great and solemnly whirling dance in the 
midst of nothingness. Sixty moonphases that dance lasted, twenty-four thousand days, a lifetime, a Year. 
And the name of the center and sun� the name of the sun was Eltanin: Gamma Draconis. 
Before he entered under the gray branches of the forest, Jakob Agat looked up at the sun sinking into a 
haze above the western ridge and in his mind called it by its true name, the meaning of which was that it 
was not simply the Sun, but a sun: a star among the stars. 
The voice of a child at play rang out behind him on the slopes of Tevar Hill, recalling to him the jeering, 
sidelong-looking faces, the mocking whispers that hid fear, the yells behind his back�"There's a farborn 
here! Come and look at him!" Agat, alone under the trees, walked faster, trying to outwalk humiliation. 
He had been humiliated among the tents ot Tevar and had suffered also from the sense of isolation. 
Having lived all his life in a little community of 
26 
PLANET OF EXILE 
his own kind, knowing every name and face and heart, it was hard for him to face strangers. Especially 
hostile strangers of a different species, in crowds, on their own ground. The fear and humiliation now 
caught up with him so that he stopped walking altogether for a moment. /'// be damned if I'll go back 
there! he thought. Let the old fool have his way, and sit smoke-drying himself in his stinking tent till the 
Goal come. Ignorant, bigoted, quarrelsome, mealy-face, yellow-eyed barbarians, wood-headed hilfs, let 
'em all burn! 
"Alterra?" 
The girl had come after him. She stood a few yards behind him on the path, her hand on the striated 
white trunk of a basuk tree. Yellow eyes blazed with excitement and mockery in the even white of her 
face. Agat stood motionless. 
"Alterra?" she said again in her light, sweet voice, looking aside. 
"What do you want?" 
She drew back a bit. "I'm Rolery," she said. "On the sands�" 
"I know who you are. Do you know who I am? I'm a falseman, a farborn. If your tribesmen see you with 

me they'll either castrate me or ceremonially rape you�I don't know which rules you follow. Now go 
home!" 
"My people don't do that. And there is kinship between you and me," she said, her tone stubborn but 
uncertain. 
He turned to go. 
"Your mother's sister died in our tents�" 
"To our shame," he said, and went on. She did not follow. 
He stopped and looked back when he took the left fork up the ridge. Nothing stirred in all the dying 
forest, except one belated footroot down among the dead leaves, creeping with its excruciating vegetable 
obstinacy southward, leaving a thin track scored behind it. 
Racial pride forbade him to feel any shame for his treat- 
27 
PLANET OF EXILE 
ment of the girl, and in fact he felt relief and a return of confidence. He would have to get used to the 
hilfs' insults and ignore their bigotry. They couldn't help it; it was their own kind of obstinacy, it was 
then- nature. The old chief had shown, by his own lights, real courtesy and patience. He, Jakob Agat, 
must be equally patient, and equally obstinate. For the fate of his people, the life of mankind on this 
world, depended on what these hilf tribes did and did not do in the next thirty days. Before the crescent 
moon rose, the history of a race for six hundred moonphases, ten Years, twenty generations, the long 
struggle, the long pull might end. Unless he had luck, unless he had patience. 
Dry leafless, with rotten branches, huge trees stood crowded and aisled for miles along these hills, their 
roots withered in the earth. They were ready to fall under the push of the north wind, to lie under frost 
and snow for thousands of days and nights, to rot in the long, long thaws of Spring, to enrich with their 
vast death the earth where, very deep, very deeply sleeping, their seeds lay buried now. Patience, 
patience . . . 
In the wind he came down the bright stone streets of Landin to the Square, and passing the schoolchildren 
at their exercises in the arena, entered the arcaded, towered building that was called by an old 
name: the Hall of the League. 
Like the other buildings around the Square, it had been built five years ago when Landin was the capital 
of a strong and nourishing little nation, the time of strength. The whole first floor was a spacious 
meeting-hall. All around its gray walls were broad, delicate designs picked out in gold. On the east wall 

a stylized sun surrounded by nine planets faced the west wall's pattern of seven planets in very long 
ellipses round their sun. The third planet of each system was double, and set with crystal. Above the 
doors and at the far end, round dial-faces with fragile and ornate hands told that this present day was the 
391st day of the 45th moonphase of the Tenth Local Year of the Colony on Gam- 
28 
PLANET OF EXILE 
ma Draconis III. They also told that it was the two hundred and second day of Year 1405 of the League 
of All Worlds; and that it was the twelfth of August at home. 
Most people doubted that there was still a League of All Worlds, and a few paradoxicalists liked to 
question whether there ever had in fact been a home. But the clocks, here in the Great Assembly and 
down in the Records Room underground, which had been kept running for six hundred League Years, 
seemed to indicate by their origin and their steadfastness that there had been a League and that there still 
was a home, a birthplace of the race of man. Patiently they kept the hours of a planet lost in the abyss of 
darkness and years. Patience, patience . . . 
The other Alterrans were waiting for him hi the library upstairs, or came in soon, gathering around the 
driftwood fire on the hearth: ten of them all together. Seiko and Alia Pasfal lighted the gas jets and 
turned them low. Though Agat had said nothing at all, his friend Huru Pilotson coming to stand beside 
him at the fire said, "Don't let 'em get you, Jakob. A herd of stupid stubborn nomads�they'll never 
learn." 
"Have I been sending?" 
"No, of course not." Huru giggled. He was a quick, slight, shy fellow, devoted to Jakob Agat. That he 
was a homosexual and that Agat was not was a fact well-known to them both, to everybody around 
them, to everyone in Landin indeed. Everybody in Landin knew everything, and candor, though wearing 
and difficult, was the only possible solution to this problem of over-communication. 
"You expected too much when you left, that's all. Your disappointment shows. But don't let 'em get you, 
Jakob. They're just hilfs." 
Seeing the others were listening, Agat said aloud, "I told the old man what I'd planned to; he said he'd 
tell their Council. How much he understood and how much he believed, I don't know." 
"If he listened at all it's better than I'd hoped," said Alia 
29 
PLANET OF EXILE 

Pasfal, sharp and frail, with blueblack skin, and white hair crowning her worn face. "Wold's been around 
as long as I have�longer. Don't expect him to welcome wars and changes." 
"But he should be well disposed�he married a human," Dermat said. 
"Yes, my cousin Arilia, Jakob's aunt�the exotic one in Wold's female zoo. I remember the courtship," 
Alia Pasfal said with such bitter sarcasm that Dermat wilted. 
"He didn't make any decision about helping us? Did you tell him your plan about going up to the border 
to meet the Gaal?" Jonkendy Li stammered, hasty and disappointed. He was very young, and had been 
hoping for a fine war with marchings-forth and trumpets. So had they all. It beat being starved to death 
or burned alive. 
"Give them time. They'll decide," Agat said gravely to the boy. 
"How did Wold receive you?" asked Seiko Esmit. She was the last of a great family. Only the sons of 
the first leader of the Colony had borne that name Esmit. With her it would die. She was Agat's age, a 
beautiful and delicate woman, nervous, rancorous, repressed. When the Alter-rans met, her eyes were 
always on Agat. No matter who spoke she watched Agat. 
"He received me as an equal." 
Alia Pasfal nodded approvingly and said, "He always had more sense than the rest of their males." But 
Seiko went on, "What about the others? Could you just walk through their camp?" Seiko could always 
dig up his humiliation no matter how well he had buried and forgotten it. His cousin ten times over, his 
sister-playmate-lover-companion, she possessed an immediate understanding of any weakness in him 
and any pain he felt, and her sympathy, her compassion closed in on him like a trap. They were too 
close. Too close, Hum, old Alia, Seiko, all of them. The isolation that had unnerved him today had also 
given him a glimpse of distance, of solitude, had perhaps waked a 
30 
PLANET OF EXILE 
craving in him. Seiko gazed at him, watching him with clear, soft, dark eyes, sensitive to his every mood 
and word. The hilf girl, Rolery, had never yet looked at him, never met his gaze. Her look always was 
aside, away, glancing, golden, alien. 
"They didn't stop me," he answered Seiko briefly. "Well, tomorrow maybe they'll decide on our 
suggestion. Or the next day. How's the provisioning of the Stack been going this afternoon?" The talk 
became general, though it tended always to center around and be referred back to Jakob Agat. He was 
younger than several of them, and all ten Al-terrans were elected equal in their ten-year terms on the 

council, but he was evidently and acknowledgedly their leader, their center. No especial reason for this 
was visible unless it was the vigor with which he moved and spoke; is authority noticeable in the man, 
or in the men about him? The effects of it, however, showed in him as a certain tension and somberness, 
the results of a heavy load of responsibility that he had borne for a long time, and that got daily heavier. 
"I made one slip," he said to Pilotson, while Seiko and the other women of the council brewed and 
served the little, hot, ceremonial eupfuls of steeped basuk leaves called ti. "I was trying so hard to 
convince the old fellow that there really is danger from the Gall, that I think I sent for a moment. Not 
verbally; but he looked like he'd seen a ghost." 
"You've got very powerful sense-projection, and lousy control when you're under strain. He probably 
did see a ghost." 
"We've been out of touch with the hilfs so long�and we're so ingrown here, so damned isolated, I can't 
trust my control. First I bespeak that girl down on the beach, then I project to Wold�they'll be turning 
on us as witches if this goes on, the way they did in the first Years. . . . And we've got to get them to 
trust us. In so short a time. If only we'd known about the Gaal earlier!" 
"Well," Pilotson said in his careful way, "since there are 
31 
PLANET OF EXILE 
no more human settlements up the coast, it's purely due to your foresight in sending scouts up north that 
we have any warning at all. Your health, Seiko," he added, accepting the tiny, steaming cup she 
presented. 
Agat took the last cup from her tray, and drained it. There was a slight sense-stimulant hi freshly brewed 
ti, so that he was vividly aware of its astringent, clean heat hi his throat, of Seiko's intense gaze, of the 
bare, large firelit room, of the twilight outside the windows. The cup in his hand, blue porcelain, was 
very old, a work of the Fifth Year. The handpress books hi cases under the windows were old. Even the 
glass in the windowframes was old. All their luxuries, all that made them civilized, all that kept them 
Alterran, was old. In Agat's lifetime and for long before there had been no energy or leisure for subtle 
and complex affirmations of man's skill and spirit. They did well by now merely to preserve, to endure. 
Gradually, Year by Year for at least ten generations, their numbers had been dwindling; very gradually, 
but always there were fewer children born. They retrenched, they drew together. Old dreams of 
domination were forgotten utterly. They came back�if the Winters and hostile hilf tribes did not take 
advantage of their weakness first�to the old center, the first colony, Landin. They taught then: children 
the old knowledge and the old ways, but nothing new. They lived always a little more humbly, coming 
to value the simple over the elaborate, calm over strife, courage over success. They withdrew. 

Agat, gazing into the tiny cup hi his hand, saw in its clear, pure translucency, the perfect skill of its 
making and the fragility of its substance, a kind of epitome of the spirit of his people. Outside the high 
windows the air was the same translucent blue. But cold: a blue twilight, immense and cold. The old 
terror of his childhood came over Agat, the terror which, as he became adult, he had reasoned thus: this 
world on which he had been born, on which his father and forefathers for twenty-three generations had 
been born, 
32 
PLANET OF EXILE 
was not his home. His kind was alien. Profoundly, they were always aware of it. They were the Farborn. 
And little by little, with the majestic slowness, the vegetable obstinacy of the process of evolution, this 
world was killing them�rejecting the graft. 
They were perhaps too submissive to this process, too willing to die out. But a kind of submission�their 
iron adherence to the League Laws�had been their strength from the very beginning; and they were still 
strong, each one of them. But they had not the knowledge or the skill to combat the sterility and early 
abortion that reduced then" generations. For not all wisdom was written in the League Books, and from 
day to day and Year to Year a little knowledge would always be lost, supplanted by some more 
immediately useful bit of information concerning daily existence here and now. And in the end, they 
could not even understand much of what the books told them. What truly remained of their Heritage, by 
now? If ever the ship, as in the old hopes and tales, soared down in fire from the stars, would the men 
who stepped from it know them to be men? 
But no ship had come, or would come. They would die; their presence here, their long exile and struggle 
on this world, would be done with, broken like a bit of clay. 
He put the cup very carefully down on the tray, and wiped the sweat off his forehead. Seiko was 
watching him. He turned from her abruptly and began to listen to Jon-kendy, Dermat and Pilotson. 
Across his bleak rush of foreboding he had recalled briefly, irrelevant and yet seeming both an 
explanation and a sign, the light, lithe, frightened figure of the girl Rolery, reaching up her hand to him 
from the dark, sea-besieged stones. 
33 
,1 
CHAPTER FOUR: The Tall Young Men 
THE SOUND OF rock pounded on rock, hard and unrever-berant, rang out among the roofs and 
unfinished walls of the Winter City to the high red tents pitched all around it. Ak ak ak ak, the sound we. 
nt on for a long tune, until suddenly a second pounding joined it in counterpoint, kadak ak ak kadak. 

Another came in on a higher note, giving a tripping rhythm, then another, another, more, until any 
measure was lost in the clatter of constant sound, an avalanche of the high dry whack of rock hitting 
rock in which each individual pounding rhythm was submerged, indistinguishable. 
As the sound-avalanche went ceaselessly and stupefying-ly on, the Eldest Man of the Men of Askatevar 
walked slowly from his tent and between the aisles of tents and cookfires from which smoke rose 
through slanting late-afternoon, late-autumn light. Stiff and ponderous the old man went alone through 
the camp of his people and entered the gate of the Winter City, followed a twisting path or street among 
the tent-like wooden roofs of the houses, which had no sidewalls aboveground, and came to an open 
place in the middle of the roofpeaks. There a hundred or so men sat, knees to chin, pounding rock on 
rock, pounding, in a hypnotic toneless trance of percussion. Wold sat down, 
34 
PLANET OF EXILE 
completing the circle. He picked up the smaller of two heavy waterworn rocks in front of him and with 
satisfying heaviness whacked it down on the bigger one: Klak! klak! klak! To right and left of him the 
clatter went on and on, a rattling roar of random noise, through which every now and then a snatch of a 
certain rhythm could be discerned. The rhythm vanished, recurred, a chance concatenation of noise. On 
its return Wold caught it, fell in with it and held it. Now to him it dominated the clatter. Now his 
neighbor to the left was beating it, their two stones rising and faUing together; now his neighbor to the 
right. Now others across the circle were beating it, pounding together. It came clear of the noise, 
conquered it, forced each conflicting voice into its own single ceaseless rhythm, the concord, the hard 
heartbeat of the Men of Askatevar, pounding on, and on, and on. 
This was all their music, all their dance. 
A man leaped up at last and walked into the center of the ring. He was bare-chested, black stripes 
painted up his arms and legs, his hair a black cloud around his face. The rhythm lightened, lessened, 
died away. Silence. 
"The runner from the north brought news that the Gaal follow the Coast Trail and come in great force. 
They have come to Tlokna. Have you all heard this?" 
A rumble of assent. 
"Now listen to the man who called this Stone-Pounding," the shaman-herald called out; and Wold got up 
with difficulty. He stood in his place, gazing straight ahead, massive, scarred, immobile, an old boulder 
of a man. 
"A farborn came to my tent," he said at last in his age-weakened, deep voice. "He is chief of them in 
Landin. He said the farborns have grown few and ask the help of men. 

A rumble from all the heads of clans and families that sat moveless, knees to chin, in the circle. Over the 
circle, over the wooden roofpeaks about them, very high up in the cold, golden light, a white bird 
wheeled, harbinger of winter. 
"This farborn said the Southing comes not by clans and 
35 
PLANET OF EXILE 
PLANET OF EXILE 
tribes but all in one horde, many thousands led by a great chief." 
"How does he know?" somebody roared. Protocol was not strict in the Stone-Poundings of Tevar; Tevar 
had never been ruled by its shamans as some tribes were. "He had scouts up north!" Wold roared back. 
"He said the Gaal besiege Winter Cities and capture them. That is what the runner said of Tlokna. The 
farborn says that the warriors of Tevar should join with the farborns and with the men of Pernmek and 
AUakskat, go up in the north of our range, and turn the Southing aside to the Mountain Trail. These 
things he said and I heard them. Have you all heard?" 
The assent was uneven and turbulent, and a clan chief was on his feet at once. "Eldest! from your mouth 
we hear the truth always. But when did a farborn speak truth? When did men listen to farborns? I hear 
nothing this farborn said. What if his City perishes in the Southing? No men live in it! Let them perish 
and then we men can take their Range." 
The speaker, Walmek, was a big dark man full of words; Wold had never liked him, and dislike 
influenced his reply. "I have heard Walmek. Not for the first time. Are the farborns men or not�who 
knows? Maybe they fell out of the sky as in the tale. Maybe not. No one ever fell out of the sky this 
Year . . . They look like men; they fight like men. Their women are like women, I can tell you that! They 
have some wisdom. It's better to listen to them . . ." His references to farborn women had them all 
grinning as they sat in their solemn circle, but he wished he had not said it. It was stupid to remind them 
of his old ties with the aliens. And it was wrong . . . she had been his wife, after all... 
He sat down, confused, signifying he would speak no more. 
Some of the other men, however, were impressed enough by the runner's tale and Agat's warning to 
argue with those who discounted or distrusted the news. One of Wold's Springborn sons, Umaksuman 
who loved raids and forays, 
36 

spoke right out in favor of Agat's plan of marching up to the border. 
"It's a trick to get our men away up north on the Range, caught in the first snow, while the farborns steal 
our flocks and wives and rob the granaries here. They're not men, there's no good in them!" Walmek 
ranted. Rarely had he found so good a subject to rant on. 
"That's all they've ever wanted, our women. No wonder they're growing few and dying out, all they bear 
is monsters. They want our women so they can bring up human children as theirs!" This was a youngish 
family-head, very excited. "Aagh!" Wold growled, disgusted at this mishmash of misinformation, but he 
kept sitting and let Umaksuman set the fellow straight. 
"And what if the farborn spoke truth?" Umaksuman went on. "What if the Gaal come through our Range 
all together, thousands of them? Are we ready to fight them?" 
"But the walls aren't finished, the gates aren't up, the last harvest isn't stored," an older man said. This, 
more than distrust of the aliens, was the core of the question. If the able men marched off to the north, 
could the women and children and old men finish all the work of readying the Winter City before winter 
was upon them? Maybe, maybe not. It was a heavy chance to take on the word of a farborn. 
Wold himself had made no decision, and looked to abide by that of the Elders. He liked the farborn 
Agat, and would guess him neither deluded nor a liar; but there was no telling. All men were alien one to 
another, at times, not only aliens. You could not tell. Perhaps the Gaal were coming as an army. 
Certainly the Winter was coming. Which enemy first? 
The Elders swayed toward doing nothing, but Umaksu-man's faction prevailed to the extent of having 
runners sent to the two neighboring Ranges, Allakskat and Pernmek, to sound them out on the project of 
a joint defense. That was all the decision made; the shaman released the scrawny harm he had caught in 
case a decision for war was reached 
37 
PLANET OF EXILE 
and must be sealed by lapidation, and the Elders dispersed. 
Wold was sitting in his tent with men of his Kin over a good hot pot of bhan, when there was a 
commotion outside. Umaksuman went out, shouted at everybody to clear out, and reentered the great 
tent behind the f arborn Agat. 
"Welcome, Alterra," said the old man, and with a sly glance at Ms two grandsons, "will you sit with us 
and eat?" 
He liked to shock people; he always had. That was why he had always been running off to the farborns 

in the old days. And this gesture freed him in his mind, from the vague shame he suffered since speaking 
before the other men of the farborn girl who had so long ago been his wife. 
Agat, calm and grave as before, accepted and ate enough to show he took the hospitality seriously; he 
waited till they were all done eating, and Ukwet's wife had scuttled out with the leavings, then he said, 
"Eldest, I listen." 
"There's not much to hear," Wold replied. He belched. "Runners go to Pernmek and Allakskat. But few 
spoke for war. The cold grows each day now: safety lies inside walls, under roofs. We don't walk about 
in timepast as your people do, but we know what the Way of Man has always been and is, and hold to it." 
"Your way is good," the farborn said, "good enough, maybe, that the Gaal have learned it from you. In 
past Winters you were stronger than the Gaal because your clans were gathered together against them. 
Now the Gaal too have learned that strength lies in numbers." 
"// that news is true," said Ukwet, who was one of Wold's grandsons, though older than Wold's son 
Umaksuman. 
Agat looked up at him in silence. Ukwet turned aside at once from that straight, dark gaze. 
"If it's not true, then why are the Gaal so late coming south?" said Umaksuman. "What's keeping them? 
Have they ever waited till the harvests were in before?" 
"Who knows?" said Wold. "Last Year they came long before the Snowstar rose, I remember that. But 
who remembers the Year before last?" 
38 
PLANET OF EXILE 
"Maybe they're following the Mountain Trail," said the other grandson, "and won't come through 
Askatevar at all." 
"The runner said they had taken Tlokna," Umaksuman said sharply, "and Tlokna is north of Tevar on the 
Coast Trail. Why do we disbelieve this news, why do we wait to act?" 
"Because men who fight wars in Winter don't live till Spring," Wold growled. 
"But if they come�" 
"If they come, we'll fight." 
There was a little pause. Agat for once looked at none of them, but kept his dark gaze lowered like a 

human. 
"People say," Ukwet remarked with a jeering note, sensing triumph, "that the farborns have strange 
powers. I know nothing about all that, I was born on the Summer-lands and never saw farborns before 
this moonphase, let alone sat to eat with one. But if they're witches and have such powers, why would 
they need our help against the Gaal?" 
"I do not hear you!" Wold thundered, his face purple and his eyes watering. Ukwet hit his face. Enraged 
by this insolence to a tent-guest, and by his own confusion and in-decisiveness which made him argue 
against both sides, Wold sat breathing heavily, staring with inflamed eyes at the young man, who kept 
his face hidden. 
"I talk," Wold said at last, his voice still loud and deep, free for a little from the huskiness of old age. "I 
talk: listen! Runners will go up the Coast Trail until they meet the Southing. And behind them, two days 
behind, but no farther than the border of our Range, warriors will follow�all men born between 
Midspring and the Summer Fallow. If the Gaal come in force, the warriors will drive them east to the 
mountains; if not, they will come back to Tevar." 
Umaksuman laughed aloud and said, "Eldest, no man leads us but you!" 
Wold growled and belched and settled down. "You'll lead the warriors, though," he told Umaksuman 
dourly. 
39 
PLANET OF EXILE 
Agat, who had not spoken for some time, said in his quiet way, "My people can send three hundred and 
fifty men. We'll go up the old beach road, and join with your men at the border of Askatevar." He rose 
and held out his hand. Sulky at having been driven into this commitment, and still shaken by his 
emotion, Wold ignored him. Umaksuman was on his feet in a flash, his hand against the farborn's. They 
stood there for a moment in the firelight like day and night. Agat dark, shadowy, somber, Umaksuman 
fair-skinned, light-eyed, radiant. 
The decision was made, and Wold knew he could force it upon the other Elders. He knew also that it 
was the last decision he would ever make. He could send them to war: but Umaksuman would come 
back, the leader of the warriors, and thereby the strongest leader among the Men of Askatevar. Wold's 
action was his own abdication. Umaksuman would be the young chief. He would close the circle of the 
Stone-Pounding, he would lead the hunters in Winter, the forays in Spring, the great wanderings of the 
long days of Summer. His Year was just beginning ... 
"Go on," Wold growled at them all. "Call the Stone-Pounding for tomorrow, Umaksuman. Tell the 
shaman to stake out a hann, a fat one with some blood in it." He would not speak to Agat. They left, all 

the tall young men. He sat crouched on his stiff hams by his fire, staring into the yellow flames as if into 
the heart of a lost brightness, Summer's irrecoverable warmth. 
40 
CHAPTER FIVE: Twilight in the Woods 
THE FARBORN CAME out of Umaksuman's tent and stood a minute talking with the young chief, both 
of them looking to the north, eyes narrowed against the biting gray wind. Agat moved his outstretched 
hand as if he spoke of the mountains. A flaw of wind carried a word or two of what he said to Rolery 
where she stood watching on the path up to the city gate. As she heard him speak a tremor went through 
her, a little rush of fear, and darkness through her veins, making her remember how that voice had 
spoken in her mind, in her flesh, calling her to him. 
Behind that like a distorted echo in her memory came the harsh command, outward as a slap, when on 
the forest path he had turned on her, telling her to go, to get away from him. 
All of a sudden she put down the baskets she was carrying. They were moving today from the red tents 
of her nomad childhood into the warren of peaked roofs and underground halls and tunnels and alleys of 
the Winter City, and all her cousin-sisters and aunts and nieces were bustling and squealing and 
scurrying up and down the paths and in and out of the tents and the gates with furs and boxes and 
branches tearing at her clothes, catching her hood. The there beside the path and walked off toward the 
forest. 
"Rolery! Ro-o-olery!" shrilled the voices that were for- 
41 
PLANET OF EXILE 
ever shrilling after her, accusing, calling, screeching at her back. She never turned, but walked right on. 
As soon as she was well into the woods she began to run. When all sound of voices was lost in the 
soughing, groaning silence of the wind-strained trees, and nothing recalled the camp of her people 
except a faint, bitter scent of woodsmoke in the wind, she slowed down-Great fallen trunks barred the 
path now hi places, and must be climbed over or crawled under, the stiff dead branches tearing at her 
clothes, cathcing her hood. The woods were not safe in this wind; even now, somewhere off up-the ridge 
she heard the muttering crash of a tree falling before the wind's push. She did not care. She felt like 
going down onto those gray sands again and standing still, perfectly still, to watch the foaming thirtyfoot 
wall of water come down upon her ... As suddenly as she had started off, she stopped, and stood still 
on the twilit path. 
The wind blew and ceased and blew. A murky sky writhed and lowered over the network of leafless 
branches. It was already half dark here. All anger and purpose drained out of the girl, leaving her 

standing in a kind of scared stupor, hunching her shoulders against the wind. Something white flashed in 
front of her and she cried out, but did not move. Again the white movement passed, then stilled suddenly 
above her on a jagged branch: a great beast or bird, winged, pure white, white above and below, with 
short, sharp hooked lips that parted and closed, and staring silver eyes. Gripping the branch with four 
naked talons the creature gazed down at her, and she up at it, neither moving. The silver eyes never 
blinked. Abruptly great white wings shot out, wider than a man's height, and beat among the branches, 
breaking them. The creature beat its white wings and screamed, then as the wind gusted launched out 
into the air and made its way heavily off between the branches and the driving clouds. 
"A stormbringer." Agat spoke, standing on the path a 
42 
PLANET OF EXILE 
few yards behind her. "They're supposed to bring the blizzards." 
The great silver creature had driven all her wits away. The little rush of tears that accompanied all strong 
feelings in her race bunded her a moment. She had meant to stand and mock him, to jeer at him, having 
seen the resentment under his easy arrogance when people in Tevar slighted him, treated him as what he 
was, a being of a lower kind. But the white creature, the stormbringer, had frightened her and she broke 
out, staring straight at him as she had at it, "I hate you, you're not a man, I hate you!" 
Then her tears stopped, she looked away, and they both stood there in silence for quite a while. 
"Rolery," said the quiet voice, "look at me." 
She did not. He came forward, and she drew back crying, "Don't touch me!" hi a voice like the 
stormbringer's scream, her face distorted. "Get hold of yourself," he said. "Here�take my hand, take it!" 
He caught her as she struggled to break away, and held both her wrists. Again they stood without 
moving. 
"Let me go," she said at last in her normal voice. He released her at once. 
She drew a long breath. 
"You spoke�I heard you speak inside me. Down there on the sands. Can you do that again?" 
He was watching her, alert and quiet. He nodded. "Yes. But I told you then that I never would." 
"I still hear it. I feel your voice." She put her hands over her ears. 
"I know . . . I'm sorry. I didn't know you were a hilf� a Tevaran, when I called you. It's against the law. 

And anyhow it shouldn't have worked ..." 
"What's a hilf?" 
"What we call you." 
"What do you call yourselves?" 
"Men." 
43 
PLANET OF EXILE 
She looked around them at the groaning twilit woods, gray aisles, writhing cloud-roof. This gray world 
in motion was very strange, but she was no longer scared. His touch, his actual hand's touch canceling 
the insistent impalpable sense of his presence, had given her calm, which grew as they spoke together. 
She saw now that she had been half out of her mind this last day and night. 
"Can all your people do that. . . speak that way?" 
"Some can. It's a skill one can learn. Takes practice. Come here, sit down a while. You've had it rough." 
He was always harsh and yet there was an edge, a hint of something quite different in his voice now: as 
if the urgency with which he had called to her on the sands were transmuted into an infinitely restrained, 
unconscious appeal, a reaching out. They sat down on a fallen basuk-tree a couple of yards off the path. 
She noticed how differently he moved and sat than a man of her race; the schooling of his body, the sum 
of his gestures, was very slightly, but completely, unfamiliar. She was particularly aware of his darkskinned 
hands, clasped together between his knees. He went on, "Your people could learn mindspeech if 
they wanted to. But they never have, they call it witchcraft, I think . . . Our books say that we ourselves 
learned it from another race, long ago, on a world called Rokanan. It's a skill as well as a gift." 
"Can you hear my mind when you want?" 
"That is forbidden," he said with such finality that her fears on that score were quite disposed of. 
"Teach me the skill," she said with suddea childishness. 
"It would take all Winter." 
"It took you all fall?" 
"And part of Summer too." He grinned slightly. 

"What does hilf mean?" 
"It's a word from our old language. It means 'Highly intelligent life-form.'" 
"Where is another world?" 
44 
PLANET OF EXILE 
"Well�there are a lot of them. Out there. Beyond sun and moon." 
"Then you did fall out of the sky? What for? How did you get from behind the sun to the seacoast here?" 
"I'll tell you if you want to hear, but it's not just a tale, Rolery. There's a lot we don't understand, but 
what we do know of our history is true." 
"I hear," she whispered in the ritual phrase, impressed, but not entirely subdued. 
"Well, there were many worlds out among the stars, and many kinds of men living on them. They made 
ships that could sail the darkness between the worlds, and kept traveling about and trading and 
exploring. They allied themselves into a League, as your clans ally with one another to make a Range. 
But there was an enemy of the League of All Worlds. An enemy coming from far off. I don't know how 
far. The books were written for men who knew more than we know . . ." 
He was always using words that sounded like words, but meant nothing; Rolery wondered what a ship 
was, what a book was. But the grave, yearning tone in which he told his story worked on her and she 
listened fascinated. 
"For a long time the League prepared to fight that enemy. The stronger worlds helped the weaker ones to 
arm against the enemy, to make ready. A little as we're trying to make ready to meet the Gaal, here. 
Mindhearing was one skill they taught, I know, and there were weapons, the books say fires that could 
burn up whole planets and burst the stars . . . Well, during that time my people came from their homeworld 
to this one. Not very many of them. They were to make friends with your peoples and see if they 
wanted to be a world of the League, and join against the enemy. But the enemy came. The ship that 
brought my people went back to where it came from, the help in fighting the war, and some of the 
people went with it, and the . . . the far-speaker with which those men could talk to one another from 
world to world. But some of the people 
45 
PLANET OF EXILE 

stayed on here, either to help this world if the enemy came here, or because they couldn't go back again: 
we don't know. Their records say only that the ship left. A white spear of metal, longer than a whole 
city, standing up on a feather of fire. There are pictures of it. I think they thought it would come back 
soon. . . That was ten Years ago." 
"What of the war with the enemy?" 
"We don't know. We don't know anything that happened since the day the ship left. Some of us figure 
the war must have been lost, and others think it was won, but hardly, and the few men left here were 
forgotten in the years of fighting. Who knows? If we survive, some day we'll find out; if no one ever 
comes, we'll make a ship and go find out. . ." He was yearning, ironic. Rolery's head spun with these 
gulfs of time and spice and incomprehension. "This is hard to live with," she said after a while. 
Agat laughed, as if startled. "No�it gives us our pride. What is hard is to keep alive on a world you 
don't belong to. Five Years ago we were a great people. Look at us now." 
"They say farborns are never sick, is that true?" 
"Yes. We don't catch your sicknesses, and didn't bring any of our own. But we bleed when we're cut, 
you know . . . And we get old, we die, like humans . . ." 
"Well of course," she said disgustedly. 
He dropped his sarcasm. "Our trouble is that we don't bear enough children. So many abort and are 
stillborn, so few come to term." 
"I heard that. I thought about it. You do so strangely. You conceive children any time of the Year, 
during the Winter Fallow even�why is that?" 
"We can't help it, it's how we are." He laughed again, looking at her, but she was very serious now. "I 
was born out of season, in the Summer Fallow," she said. "It does happen with us, but very rarely; and 
you see�when Winter's over I'll be too old to bear a Spring child. I'll never have a son. Some old man 
will take me for a fifth wife one of these days, but the Winter Fallow has begun, and come 
46 
PLANET OF EXILE 
Spring I'll be old . . . So I will die barren. It's better for a woman not to be born at all than to be born out 
of season as I was . . . And another thing, it is true what they say, that a farborn man takes only one 
wife?" 
He nodded. Apparently that meant what a shrug meant to her. 

"Well, no wonder you're dying out!" 
He grinned, but she insisted, "Many wives�many sons. If you were a Tevaran you'd have five or ten 
children already! Have you any?" 
"No, I'm not married." 
"But haven't you ever lain with a woman!" 
"Well, yes," he said, and then more assertively, "Of course! But when we want children, we marry." 
"If you were one of us�" 
"But I'm not one of you," he said. Silence ensued. Finally he said, gently enough, "It isn't manners and 
mores that make the difference. We don't know what's wrong, but it's in the seed. Some doctors have 
thought that because this sun's different from the sun our race was born under, it affects us, changes the 
seed in us little by little. And the change kills." 
Again there was silence between them for a time. "What was the other world like�your home?" 
"There are songs that tell what it was like," he said, but when she asked timidly what a song was, he did 
not reply. After a while he said, "At home, the world was closer to its sun, and the whole year there 
wasn't even one moonphase long. So the books say. Think of it, the whole Winter would only last ninety 
days . . ." This made them both laugh. "You wouldn't have time to light a fire," Rolery said. 
Real darkness was soaking into the dimness of the woods. The path in front of them ran indistinct, a 
faint gap among the trees leading left to her city, right to his. Here, between, was only wind, dusk, 
solitude. Night was coming quickly. Night and winter and war, a time of dying. "I'm afraid of the 
Winter," she said, very low. 
47 
PLANET OF EXILE 
"We all are," he said. "What will it be like? . . . We've only known the sunlight." 
There was no one among her people who had ever broken her fearless, careless solitude of mind; having 
no age-mates, and by choice also, she had always been quite alone, going her own way and caring little 
for any person. But now as the world had turned gray and nothing held any promise beyond death, now 
as she first felt fear, she had met him, the dark figure near the tower-rock over the sea, and had heard a 
voice that spoke in her blood. 

"Why will you never look at me?" he asked. 
"I will," she said, "if you want me to." But she did not, though she knew his strange shadowy gaze was 
on her. At last she put out her hand and he took it. 
"Your eyes are gold," he said. "I want... I want. . . But if they knew we were together, even now. . ." 
"Your people?" 
"Yours. Mine care nothing about it." 
"And mine needn't find out." They both spoke almost in whispers, but urgently, without pauses. 
"Rolery, I leave for the north two nights from now." 
"I know that." 
"When I come back�" 
"But when you don't come back!" the girl cried out, under the pressure of the terror that had entered her 
with Autumn's end, the fear of coldness, of death. He held her against him telling her quietly that he 
would come back. As he spoke she felt the beating of his heart and the beating of her own. "I want to 
stay with you," she said, and he was saying, "I want to stay with you." 
It was dark around them. When they got up they walked slowly in a grayish darkness. She came with 
him, towards his city. "Where can we go?" he said with a kind of bitter laugh. "This isn't like love hi 
Summer . . . There's a hunter's shelter down the ridge a way . . . They'll miss you in Tevar." 
"No," she whispered, "they won't miss me." 
48 
CHAPTER SIX: Snow 
THE FORE-RUNNERS had gone; tomorrow the Men of Askatevar would march north on the broad 
vague trail that divided their Range, while the smaller group from Landin would take the old road up the 
coast. Like Agat, Umaksu-man had judged it best to keep the two forces apart until the eve of fighting. 
They were allied only by Wold's authority. Many of Umaksuman's men, though veterans of many raids 
and forays before the Winter Peace, were reluctant to go on this unseasonal war; and a sizable faction, 
even within his own Kin, so detested this alliance with the farborns that they were ready to make any 
trouble they could. Uk-wet and others had said openly that when they had finished with the Gaal they 
would finish off the witches. Agat discounted this, foreseeing that victory would modify, and defeat end, 
their prejudice; but it worried Umaksuman, who did not look so far ahead. 

"Our scouts will keep you in sight all along. After all, the Gaal may not wait on the border for us." 
"The Long Valley under Cragtop would be a good place for a battle," Umaksuman said with his flashing 
smile. "Good luck, Alterra!" 
"Good luck to you, Umaksuman." They parted as friends, there under the mud-cemented stone gateway 
of the Winter City. As Agat turned something flickered in the 
49 
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PLANET OF EXILE 
dull afternoon air beyond the arch, a wavering drifting movement. He looked up startled, then turned 
back. "Look at that." 
The native came out from the walls and stood beside him a minute, to see for the first time the stuff of 
old men's tales. Agat held his hand out palm up. A flickering speck of white touched his wrist and was 
gone. The long vale of stubble-fields and used-up pasture, the creek, the dark inlet of the forest and the 
farther hills to south and west all seemed to tremble very slightly, to withdraw, as random flakes fell 
from the low sky, twirling and slanting a little, though the wind was down. 
Children's voices cried in excitement behind them among the high-peaked wooden roofs. 
"Snow is smaller than I thought," Umaksuman said at last, dreamily. 
"I thought it would be colder. The air seems warmer than it did before . . ." Agat roused himself from the 
sinsiter and charming fascination of the twirling fall of the snow. "Til we meet in the north," he said, and 
pulling his fur collar close around his neck against the queer, searching touch of the tiny flakes, set out 
on the path to Landin. 
A half-kilo into the forest he saw the scarcely marked side path that led to the hunter's shelter, and 
passing it felt as if his veins were running liquid light. "Come on, come on," he told himself, impatient 
with his recurrent loss of self-control. He had got the whole thing perfectly straight in the short intervals 
for thinking he had had today. Last night�had been last night. All right, it was that and nothing more. 
Aside from the fact that she was, after all, a hilf and he was human, so there was no future in the thing, it 
was foolish on other counts. Ever since he had seen her face, on the black steps over the tide, he had 
thought of her and yearned to see her, like an adolescent mooning after his first girl; and if there was 
anything he hated it was the stupidity, the obstinate stupidity of uncontrolled passion. It led men to take 
blind risks, to hazard really important things 

50 
for a mere moment of lust, to lose control over their acts. So, in order to stay in control, he had gone 
with her last night; that was merely sensible to get the fit over with. So he told himself once more, 
walking along very rapidly, his head high, while the snow danced thinly around him. Tonight he would 
meet her again, for the same reason. At the thought, a flood of warm light and an aching joy ran through 
his body and mind; he ignored it. Tomorrow he was off to the north, and if he came back, then there 
would be time enough to explain to the girl that there could be no more such nights, no more lying 
together on his fur cloak in the shelter in the forest's heart, starlight overhead and the cold and the great 
silence all around . . . no, no more . . . The absolute happiness she had given him came up in him like a 
tide, drowning all thought. He ceased to tell himself anything. He walked rapidly with his long stride in 
the gathering darkness of the woods, and as he walked, sang under his breath, not knowing that he did 
so, some old love-song of his exiled race. 
The snow scarcely penetrated the branches. It was getting dark very early, he thought as he approached 
the place where the path divided, and this was 'the last thing in his mind when something caught his 
ankle in midstride and sent him pitching forward. He landed on his hands and was half-way up when a 
shadow on his left became a man, silvery-white in the gloom, who knocked him over before he was 
fairly up. Confused by the ringing in his ears, Agat struggled free of something holding him and again 
tried to stand up. He seemed to have lost his bearings and did not understand what was happening, 
though he had an impression that it had happened before, and also that it was not actually happening. 
There were several more of the silvery-looking men with stripes down their legs and arms, and they held 
him by the arms while another one came up and struck him with something across the mouth. There was 
pain, the darkness was full of pain and rage. With a furious and skillful convulsion of his whole body he 
got free of the 
51 
PLANET OF EXILE 
silvery men, catching one under the jaw with his fist and sending him out of the scene backward: but 
there were more and more of them and he could not get free a second time. They hit him and when he 
hid his face in his arms against the mud of the path they kicked his sides. He lay pressed against the 
blessed harmless mud, trying to hide, and heard somebody breathing very strangely. Through that noise 
he also heard Umaksuman's voice. Even he, then . . . But he did not care, so long as they would go away, 
would let him be. It was getting dark very early. 
It was dark: pitch dark. He tried to crawl forward. He wanted to get home to his people who would help 
him. It was so dark he could not see his hands. Soundlessly and unseen in the absolute blackness, snow 
fell on him and around him on the mud and leafmold. He wanted to get home. He was very cold. He 
tried to get up, but there was no west or east, and sick with pain he put his head down on his arm. "Come 
to me," he tried to call in the mindspeech of Alterra, but it was to hard to call so far into the darkness. It 
was easier to lie still right here. Nothing could be easier. 

In a high stone house in Landin, by a driftwood fire, Alia Pasfal lifted her head suddenly from her book. 
She had a distinct impression that Jakob Agat was sending to her, but no message came. It was queer. 
There were all too many queer by-products and aftereffects and inexplicables involved in mindspeech; 
many people here in Landin never learned it, and those who did used it very sparingly. Up north in 
Atlantika colony they had mindspoken more freely. She herself was a refugee from Atlantika and 
remem-bred how in the terrible Winter of her childhood she had mindspoken with the others all the time. 
And after her mother and father died in the famine, for a whole moon-phase after, over and over again 
she had felt them sending to her, felt their presence in her mind�but no message, no words, silence. 
"Jakob!" She bespoke him, long and hard, but there was no answer. 
52 
PLANET OF EXILE 
At the same time, in the Armory checking over the expedition's supplies once more, Huru Pilotson 
abruptly gave way to the uneasiness that had been preying on him all day and burst out, "What the hell 
does Agat think he's doing!" 
"He's pretty late," one of the Armory boys affirmed. "Is he over at Tevar again?" 
"Cementing relations with the mealy-faces," Pilotson said, gave a mirthless giggle, and scowled. "All 
right, come on, let's see about the parkas." 
At the same time, in a room paneled with wood like ivory satin, Seiko Esmit burst into a fit of silent 
crying, wringing her hands and struggling not to send to him, not to bespeak him, not even to whisper 
his name aloud:"Jakob!" 
At the same time Rolery's mind went quite dark for a while. She simply crouched motionless where she 
was. 
She was in the hunter's shelter. She had thought, with all the confusion of the move from the tents into 
the warren-like Kinhouses of the city, that her absence and very late return had not been observed last 
night. But today was different; order was reestablished and her leaving would be seen. So she had gone 
off in broad daylight as she so often did, trusting that no one would take special notice of that; she had 
gone circuitously to the shelter, curled down there in her furs and waited till dark should fall and finally 
he should come. The snow had begun to fall; watching it made her sleepy; she watched it, wondering 
sleepily what she would do tomorrow. For he would be gone. And everyone in her clan would know she 
had been out all night. That was tomorrow. It would take care of itself. This was tonight, tonight . . . and 
she dozed off, till suddenly she woke with a great start, and crouched there a little while, her mind blank, 
dark. 

Then abruptly she scrambled up and with flint and tin-derbox lighted the basket-lantern she had brought 
with her. By its tiny glow she headed downhill till she struck the path, then hesitated, and turned west. 
Once she stopped and said, 
53 
PLANET OF EXILE 
PLANET OF EXILE 
"Alterra . . ." in a whisper. The forest was perfectly quiet in the night. She went on till she found him 
lying across the path. 
The snow, falling thicker now, streaked across the lantern's dim, small glow. The snow was sticking to 
the ground now instead of melting, and it had stuck in a powdering of white all over his torn coat and 
even on his hair. His hand, which she touched first, was cold and she knew he was dead. She sat down 
on the wet, snow-rimmed mud by him and took his head on her knees. 
He moved and made a kind of whimper, and with that Rolery came to herself. She stopped her silly 
gesture of smoothing the powdery snow from his hair and collar, and sat intent for a minute. Then she 
eased him back down, got up, automatically tried to rub the sticky blood from her hand, and with the 
lantern's aid began to seek around the sides of the path for something. She found what she needed and 
set to work. 
Soft, weak sunlight slanted down across the room. In that warmth it was hard to wake up and he kept 
sliding back down into the waters of sleep, the deep tideless lake. But the light always brought him up 
again; and finally he was awake, seeing the high gray walls about him and the slant of sunlight through 
glass. 
He lay still while the shaft of watery golden light faded and returned, slipped from the floor and pooled 
on the farther wall, rising higher, reddening. Alia Pasfal came in, and seeing he was awake signed to 
someone behind her to stay out. She closed the door and came to kneel by him. Alter-ran houses were 
sparsely furnished; they slept on pallets on the carpeted floor, and for chairs used at most a thin cushion. 
So Alia knelt, and looked down at Agat, her worn, black face lighted strongly by the reddish shaft of 
sun. There was no pity in her face as she looked at him. She had borne too much, too young, for 
compassion and scruple ever to rise from very deep in her, and in her old age she was 
54 
quite pitiless. She shok her head a little from side to side as she said softly, "Jakob . . . What have you 
done?" 
He found that his head hurt him when he tried to speak, so having no real answer he kept still. 

"What have you done . . ." 
"How did I get home?" he asked at last, forming the words so poorly with his smashed mouth that she 
raised her hand to stop him. "How you got here�is that what you asked? She brought you. The hilf girl. 
She made a sort of travois out of some branches and her furs, and rolled you onto it and hauled you over 
the ridge and to the Land Gate. At night in the snow. Nothing left on her but her breeches �she had to 
tear up her tunic to tie you on. Those hilfs are tougher than the leather they dress in. She said the snow 
made it easier to pull... No snow left now. That was night before last. You've had a pretty good rest all in 
all." 
She poured him a cup of water from the jug on a tray nearby and helped him drink. Close over him her 
face looked very old, delicate with age. She said to him with the mindspeech, unbelievingly, How could 
you do this? You were always a proud man, Jakob! 
He replied the same way, wordlessly. Put into words what he told her was: / can't get on without her. 
The old woman flinched physically away from the sense of his passion, and as if in self-defense spoke 
aloud: "But what a time to pick for a love affair, for a romance! When everyone depended on you�" 
He repeated what he had told her, for it was the truth and all he could tell her. She bespoke him with 
harshness: But you're not going to marry her, so you'd better learn to get on without her. 
He replied only, No. 
She sat back on her heels a while. When her mind opened again to his it was with a great depth of 
bitterness. Well, go ahead, what's the difference. At this point whatever we do, any of us, alone or 
together, is wrong. We can't do the right thing, the lucky thing. We can only go on committing sui- 
55 
PLANET OF EXILE 
cide, little by little, one by one. Till we're all gone, till Al-terra is gone, all the exiles dead ... 
"Alia," he broke in aloud, shaken by her despair, "the ... the men went . . . ?" 
"What men? Our army?" She said the words sarcastically. "Did they march north yesterday�without 
you?" 
"Pilotson�" 
"If Pilotson had led them anywhere it would have been to attack Tevar. To avenge you. He was crazy 

with rage yesterday." 
"Andthey. . ." 
"The hilfs? No, of course they didn't go. When it became known that Wold's daughter is running off to 
sleep with a farborn in the woods, Wold's faction comes in for a certain amount of ridicule and discredit 
�you can see that? Of course, it's easier to see it after the fact; but I should have thought�" 
"For God's sake, Alia." 
"All right. Nobody went north. We sit here and wait for the Gaal to arrive when they please." 
Jakob Agat lay very still, trying to keep himself from falling headfirst, backwards, into the void that lay 
under him. It was the blank and real abyss of his own pride: the self-deceiving arrogance from which all 
his acts had sprung: the lie. If he went under, no matter. But what of his people whom he had betrayed? 
Alia bespoke him after a while: Jakob, it was a very little hope at best. You did what you could. Man 
and unman can't work together. Six hundred home-years of failure should tell you that. Your folly was 
only their pretext. If they hadn't turned on us over it, they would have found something else very soon. 
They're our enemies as much as the Gaal. Or the Winter. Or the rest of this planet that doesn't want us. 
We can make no alliances but among ourselves. We're on our own. Never hold your hand out to any 
creature that belongs to this world. 
He turned his mind away from hers, unable to endure the 
56 
PLANET OF EXILE 
finality of her despair. He tried to lie closed in on himself, withdrawn, but something worried him 
insistently, dragged at his consciousness, until suddenly it came clear, and struggling to sit up he 
stammered, "Where is she? You didn't send her back�" 
Clothed in a white Alterran robe, Rolery sat crosslegged, a little farther away from him than Alia had 
been. Alia was gone; Rolery sat there busy with some work, mending a sandal it seemed. She had not 
seemed to notice that he spoke; perhaps he had only spoken in dream. But she said presently in her light 
voice, "That old one upset you. She could have waited. What can you do now? ... I think none of them 
knows how to take six steps without you." 
The last red of the sunlight made a dull glory on the wall behind her. She sat with a quiet face, eyes cast 
down as always, absorbed in mending a sandal. 
In her presence both guilt and pain eased off and took their due proportion. With her, he was himself. He 

spoke her name aloud. 
"Oh, sleep now; it hurts you to talk," she said with a nicker of her timid mockery. 
"Will you stay?" he asked. 
"Yes." 
"As my wife," he insisted, reduced by necessity and pain to the bare essential. He imagined that her 
people would kill her if she went back to them; he was not sure what his own people might do to her. He 
was her only defense, and he wanted the defense to be certain. 
She bowed her head as if in acceptance; he did not know her gestures well enough to be sure. He 
wondered a little at her quietness now. The little while he had known her she had always been quick 
with motion and emotion. But it had been a very little while ... As she sat there working away her 
quietness entered into him, and with it he felt his strength begin to return. 
57 
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Southing 
BRIGHT ABOVE the roofpeaks burned the star whose rising told the start of Whiter, as cheerlessly, 
bright as Wold remembered it from his boyhood sixty moonphases ago. Even the great, slender crescent 
moon opposite it in the sky seemed paler than the Snowstar. A new moonphase had begun, and a new 
season. But not auspiciously. 
Was it ture what the farborns used to say, that the moon was a world like Askatevar and the other 
Ranges, though without living creatures, and the stars too were worlds, where men and beasts, lived and 
summer and winter came? . . . What sort of men would dwell on the Snowstar? Terrible beings, white as 
snow, with pallid lipless mouths and fiery eyes, stalked through Wold's imagaination. He shook his head 
and tried to pay attention to what the other Elders were saying. The fore-runners had returned after only 
five days with various rumors from the north; and the Elders had built a fire in the great court of Tevar 
and held a Stone-Pounding. Wold had come last and closed the circle, for no other man dared; but it was 
meaningless, humiliating to him. For the war he had declared was not being fought, the men he had sent 
had not gone, and the alliance he had made was broken. 
Beside him, as silent as he, sat Umaksuman. The others shouted and wrangled, getting nowhere. What 
did they ex- 
58 
PLANET OF EXILE 

pect? No rhythm had risen out of the pounding of stones, there had been only clatter and conflict. After 
that, could they expect to agree on anything? Fools, fools, Wold thought, glowering at the fire that was 
too far away to warm him. The others were mostly younger, they could keep warm with youth and with 
shouting at one another. But he was an old man and furs did not warm him, out under the glaring 
Snowstar in the wind of Winter. His legs ached now with cold, his chest hurt, and he did not know or 
care what they were all quarreling about. 
Umaksuman was suddenly on his feet. "Listen!" he said, and the thunder of his voice (He got that from 
me, thought Wold) compelled them, though there were audible mutters and jeers. So far, though 
everybody had a fair idea what had happened, the immediate cause or pretext of their quarrel with 
Landin had not been discussed outside the walls of Wold's Kinhouse; it had simply been announced that 
Umaksuman was not to lead the foray, that there was to be no foray, that there might be an attack from 
the farborns. Those of other houses who knew nothing about Rol-ery or Agat knew what was actually 
involved: a power-struggle between factions in the most powerful clan. This was covertly going on in 
every speech made now in the Stone-Pounding, the subject of which was, nominally, whether the 
farborns were to be treated as enemies when met beyond the walls. 
Now Umaksuman spoke: "Listen, Elders of Tevar! You say this, you say that, but you have nothing left 
to say. The Gaal are coming: within three days they are here. Be silent and go sharpen your spears, go 
look to our gates and walls, because the enemy comes, they come down on us�see!" He flung out his 
arm to the north, and many turned to stare where he pointed, as if expecting the hordes of the Southing 
to burst through the wall that moment, so urgent was Umak-suman's rhetoric. 
"Why didn't you look to the gate your kinswoman went out of, Umaksuman?" 
59 
PLANET OF EXILE 
Now it was said. 
"She's your kinswoman too, Ukwet," Umaksuman said wrathfully. 
One of them was Wold's son, the other his grandson; they spoke of his daughter. For the first time in his 
life Wold knew shame, bald, helpless shame before all the best men of his people. He sat moveless, his 
head bowed down. 
"Yes, she is; and because of me, no shame rests on our Kin! I and my brothers knocked the teeth out of 
the dirty face of that one she lay with, and I had him down to geld him as he-animals should be gelded, 
but then you stopped us, Umaksuman. You stopped us with your fool talk�" 
"I stopped you so that we wouldn't have the farborns to fight along with the Gaal, you fool! She's of age 
to sleep with a man if she chooses, and this is no�" 

"He was no man, kinsman, and I am no fool." 
"You are a fool, Ukwet, for you jumped at this as a chance to make quarrel with the farborns, and so lost 
us our one chance to turn aside the Gaal!" 
"I do not hear you, liar, traitor!" 
They met with a yell in the middle of the circle, axes drawn. Wold got up. Men sitting near him looked 
up expecting him, as Eldest and clan-chief, to stop the fight. But he did not. He turned away from the 
broken circle and in silence, with his stiff, ponderous shuffle, went down the alley between the high 
slant roofs, under projecting eaves, to the house of his Kin. 
He clambered laboriously down earthen stairs into the stuffy, smoky warmth of the immense dug-out 
room. Boys and womenfolk came asking him if the Stone-Pounding was over and why he came alone. 
"Umaksuman and Ukwet are fighting," he said to get rid of them, and sat down by the fire, his legs right 
in the firepit. No good would come of this. No good would come of anything any more. When crying 
women brought in the body of his grandson Ukwet, a thick path of blood dropping behind them from the 
ax-split skull, he looked on without moving or speaking. 
60 
PLANET OF EXILE 
"Umaksuman killed him, his kinsman, his brother," Uk-wet's wives shrilled at Wold, who never raised 
his head. Finally he looked around at them heavily like an old animal beset by hunters, and said in a 
thick voice, "Be still . . . Can't you be still. . ." 
It snowed again next day. They buried Ukwet, the first-dead of the Winter, and the snow fell on the 
corpse's face before the grave was filled. Wold thought then and later of Umaksuman, outlawed, alone hi 
the hills, in the snow. Which was better off? 
His tongue was very thick and he did not like to talk. He stayed by the fire and was not sure, sometimes, 
whether outside it was day or night. He did not sleep well; he seemed somehow always to be waking up. 
He was just waking up when the noise began outside, up above ground. 
Women came shrieking in from the side-rooms, grabbing up then- little Fall-born brats. "The Gaal, the 
Gaal!" they screeched. Others were quiet as befitted women of a great house, and put the place in order 
and sat down to wait. 
No man came for Wold. 
He knew he was no longer a chief; but was he no longer a man? Must he stay with the babies and 

women by the fire, in a hole hi the ground? 
He had endured public shame, but the loss of his own self-respect he could not endure, and shaking a 
little he got up and began to rummage in his old painted chest for his leather vest and his heavy spear, 
the spear with which he had killed a snow-ghoul singlehanded, very long ago. He was stiff and heavy 
now and all the bright seasons had passed since then, but he was the same man, the same that had killed 
with that spear in the snow of another winter. Was he not the same man? They should not have left him 
here by the fire, when the enemy came. 
His fool womenfolk came squealing around him, and he got mixed up and angry. But old Kerly drove 
them all off, 
61 
PLANET OF EXILE 
gave him back his spear that one of them had taken from him, and fastened at his neck the cape of gray 
korio-fur she had made for him in autumn. There was one left who knew what a man was. She watched 
him in silence and he felt her grieving pride. So he walked very erect. She was a cross old woman and he 
was a foolish old man, but pride remained. He climbed up into the cold, bright noon, hearing beyond the 
walls the calling of foreign-voices. 
Men were gathered on the square platform over the smokehold of the House of Absence. They made 
way for him when he hoisted himself up the ladder. He was wheezing and trembling so that at first he 
could see nothing. Then he saw. For a while he forgot everything in the unbelievable sight. 
The valley that wound from north to south along the base of Tevar Hill to the river-valley east of the 
forest was full�full as the river in the flood-time, swarming, overrunning with people. They were 
moving southward, a sluggish, jumbled, dark flood, stretching and contracting, stopping and starting, 
with yells, cries, calls, creaking, snapping whips, the hoarse bray of hann, the wail of babies, the tuneless 
chanting of travois-pullers; the flash of color from a rolled-up red felt tent, a woman's painted bangles, a 
red plume, a spearhead; the stink, the noise, the movement�always the movement, moving southward, 
the Southing. But in all timepast there had never been a Southing like this, so many all together. As far 
as eye could follow up the widening valley northward there were more coming, and behind them more, 
and behind them more. And these were only the women and the brats and the baggage-train . . . Beside 
that slow torrent of people the Winter City of Tevar was nothing. A pebble on the edge of a river in 
flood. 
At first Wold felt sick; then he took heart, and said presently, "This is a wonderful thing . . ." And it was, 
this migration of all the nations of the north. He was glad to have seen it. The man next to him, an Elder, 
Anweld of Siok- 
62 

PLANET OF EXILE 
man's Kin, shrugged and answered quietly, "But it's the end of us." 
"If they stop here." 
"These won't. But the warriors come behind." 
They were so strong, so safe in their numbers, that their warriors came behind. ... 
"They'll need our stores and our herds tonight, to feed all those," Anweld went on. "As soon as these get 
by, they'll attack." 
"Send our women and children out into the hills to the west, then. This City is only a trap against such a 
force." 
"I listen," Anweld said with a shrug of assent. 
"Now�quickly�before the Gaal encircle us." 
"This has been said and heard. But others say we can't send our women out to fend for themselves while 
we stay in the shelter of the walls." 
"Then let's go with them!" Wold growled. "Can the Men of Tevar,decide nothing?" 
"They have no leader," Anweld said. "They follow this man and that man and no man." To say more 
would be to seem to blame Wold and his kinsmen; he said no more except, "So we wait here to be 
destroyed." 
"I'm going to send my womenfolk off," Wold said, irked by Anweld's cool hopelessness, and he left the 
mighty spectacle of the Southing, to lower himself down the lad-. der and go tell his kinfolk to save 
themselves while there was some chance. He meant to go with them. For there was no fighting such 
odds, and some, some few of the people of Tevar must survive. 
But the younger men of his clan did not agree and would not take his orders. They would stand and fight. 
"But you'll die," said Wold, "and your women and children might go free�if they're not here with you." 
His tongue was thick again. They could hardly wait for him to finish. 
"We'll beat off the Gaal," said a young grandson. "We are warriors!" 
63 

PLANET OF EXILE 
"Tevar is a strong city, Eldest," another said, persuasive, flattering. "You told us and taught us to build it 
well." 
"It will stand against Winter," Wold said. "Not against ten thousand warriors. I would rather see my 
women die of the cold in the bare hills, than live as whores and slaves of the Gaal." But they were not 
listening, only waiting for him to be done talking. 
He went outside again, but was too weary now to climb the ladders to the platform again. He found 
himself a place to wait out of the way of the coming and going hi the narrow alleys: a niche by a 
supporting buttress of the south wall, not far from the gate. If he clambered up on the slanting mud-brick 
buttress he could look over the wall and watch the Southing going by; when the wind got under his cape 
he could squat down, chin on knees, and have some shelter in the angle. For a while the sun shone on 
him there. He squatted in its warmth and did not think of much. Once or twice he glanced up at the sun, 
the Winter sun, old, weak in its old age. 
Winter grasses, the short-lived hasty-flowering little plants that would thrive between the blizzards until 
midwinter when the snow did not melt and nothing lived but the rootless snowcrop, already were 
pushing up through the trampled ground under the wall. Always something lived, each creature biding 
its time through the great Year, flourishing and dying down to wait again. 
The long hours went by. 
There was crying and shouting at the northwest corner of the walls. Men went running by through the 
ways of the Little city, alleys wide enough for one man only under the overhanging eaves. Then the roar 
of shouting was behind Wold's back and outside the gate to his left. The high wooden slidegate, that 
lifted from inside by means of long pulleys, rattled in its frame. They were ramming a log against it. 
Wold got up with difficulty; he had got so stiff sitting there hi the cold that he could not feel his legs. He 
leaned a minute on his spear, then got a footing with his back 
64 
PLANET OF EXILE 
against the buttress and held his spear ready, not with the thrower but poised to use at short range. 
The Gaal must be using ladders, for they were already inside the city over at the north side, he could tell 
by the noise. A spear sailed clear over the roofs, overshot with a thrower. The gate rattled again. In the 
old days they had no ladders and rams, they came not by thousands but in ragged tribes, cowardly 
barbarians, running south before the cold, not staying to live and die on their own Range as true men 
did. . . . There came one with a wide, white face and a red plume in his horn of pitch-smeared hair, 

running to open the gate from within. Wold took a step forward and said, "Stop there!" The Gaal looked 
around, and the old man drove his six-foot iron-headed spear into his enemy's side under the ribs, clear 
in. He was still trying to pull it back out of the shivering body when, behind him, the gate of the city 
began to split. That was a hideous sight, the wood splitting Like rotten leather, the snout of a thick log 
poking through. Wold left his spear in the Gaal's belly and ran down the alley, heavily, stumbling, 
towards the House of his Kin. The peaked wooden roofs of the city were all on fire ahead of him. 
65 
CHAPTER EIGHT: In The Alien City 
THE STRANGEST thing in all the strangeness of this house was the painting on the wall of the big 
room downstairs. When Agat had gone and the rooms were deathly still she stood gazing at this picture 
till it became the world and she the wall. And the world was a network: a deep network, like interlacing 
branches in the woods, like inter-running currents in water, silver, gray, black, shot through with green 
and rose and a yellow like the sun. As one watched their deep network one saw in it, among it, woven 
into it and weaving it, little and great patterns and figures, beasts, trees, grasses, men and women and 
other creatures, some like farborns and some not; and strange shapes, boxes set on round legs, birds, 
axes, silver spears and feathers of fire, faces that were not faces, stones with wings and a tree whose 
leaves were stars. 
"What is that?" she asked the farborn woman whom Agat had asked to look after her, his kinswoman; 
and she in her way that was an effort to be kind replied, "A painting, a picture�your people make 
pictures, don't they?" 
"Yes, a little. What is it telling of?" 
"Of the other worlds and our home. You see the people in it. . .It was painted long ago, in the first Year 
of our exile, by one of the sons of Esmit." 
66 
PLANET OF EXILE 
, "What is that?" Rolery pointed, from a respectful distance. 
"A building�the Great Hall of the League on the world called Davenant." 
"And that?" 
"An erkar." 
"I listen again," Rolery said politely�she was on her best manners at every moment now�but when 

Seiko Esmit seemed not to understand the formality, she asked, "What is an erkar?" 
The farborn woman pushed out her lips a little and said indifferently, "A . . . thing to ride in, like a ... 
well, you don't even use wheels, how can I tell you? You've seen our wheeled carts? Yes? Well, this was 
a cart to ride in, but it flew in the sky." 
"Can your people make such cars now?" Rolery asked in pure wonderment, but Seiko took the question 
wrong. She replied with rancor, "No. How could we keep such skills here, when the Law commanded us 
not to rise above your level? For six hundred years your people have failed to learn the use of wheels!" 
Desolate in this strange place, exiled from her people and now alone without Agat, Rolery was 
frightened of Seiko Esmit and of every person and every thing she met. But she would not be scorned by 
a jealous woman, an older woman. She said, "I ask to learn. But I think your people haven't been here 
for six hundred years." 
"Six hundred home-years is ten Years here." After a moment Seiko Esmit went on, "You see, we don't 
know all about the erkars and many other things that used to belong to our people, because when our 
ancestors came here they were sworn to obey a law of the League, which forbade them to use many 
things different from the things the native people used. This was called Cultural Embargo. In time we 
would have taught you how to make things�like wheeled carts. But the Ship left. There were few of us 
here, and no word from the League, and we found many enemies among 
67 
PLANET OF EXILE 
your nations in those days. It was hard for us to keep the Law and also to keep what we had and knew. 
So perhaps we lost much skill and knowledge. We don't know." 
"It was a strange law," Rolery murmured. 
"It was made for your sakes�not ours," Seiko said in her hurried voice, in the hard distinct farborn 
accent like Agat's, "In the Canons of the League, which we study as children, it is written: No Religion 
or Congruence shall be disseminated, no technique or theory shall be taught, no cultural set or pattern 
shall be exported, nor shall para-verbal speech be used with any non-Communicant high-intelligence 
lifeform, or any Colonial Planet, until it be judged by the Area Council with the consent or the Plenum 
that such a planet be ready for Control or for Membership ... It means, you see, that we were to live 
exactly as you live. In so far as we do not, we have broken our own Law." 
"It did us no harm," Rolery said. "And you not much good." 
"You cannot judge us," Seiko said with that rancorous coldness; then controlling herself once more, 
"There's work to be done now. Will you come?" 

Submissive, Rolery followed Seiko. But she glanced back at the painting as they left. It had a greater 
wholeness than any object she had ever seen. Its somber, silvery, unnerving complexity affected her 
somewhat as Agat's presence did; and when he was with her, she feared him, but nothing else. Nothing, 
no one. 
The fighting men of Landin were gone. They had some hope, by guerilla attacks and ambushes, of 
harrying the Gaal on southward towards less aggressive victims. It was a bare hope, and the women 
were working to ready the town for siege. Seiko and Rolery reported to the Hall of the League on the 
great square, and there were assigned to help round up the herds of hann from the long fields south of 
town. Twenty women went together; each as she left the Hall was given a packet of bread and hann-milk 
PLANET OF EXILE 
curd, for they would be gone all day. As forage grew scant the herds had ranged far south between the 
beach and the coastal ridges. The women hiked about eight miles south and then beat back, zigzagging 
to and fro, collecting and driving the little, silent, shaggy beasts in greater and greater numbers. 
Rolery saw the farborn women in a new light now. They had seemed delicate, childish, with their soft 
light clothes, their quick voices and quick minds. But here they were out in the ice-rimmed stubble of 
the hills, in furs and trousers like human women, driving the slow, shaggy herds into the north wind, 
working together, cleverly and with determination. They were wonderful with the beasts, seeming to 
lead rather than drive them, as if they had some mastery over them. They came up the road to the Sea 
Gate after the sun had set, a handful of women in a shaggy sea of trotting, high-haunched beasts. When 
Landin walls came in sight a woman lifted up her voice and sang. Rolery had never heard a voice play 
this game with pitch and time. It made her eyes blink and her throat ache, and her feet on the dark road 
kept the music's time. The singing went from voice to voice up and down the road; they sang about a 
lost home they had never known, about weaving cloth and sewing jewels on it, about warriors killed in 
war; there was a song about a girl who went mad for love and jumped into the sea, "O the waves they 
roll far out before the tide .. ." Sweet-voiced, making song out of sorrow, they came with the herds, 
twenty women walking in the windy dark. The tide was in, a soughing blackness over the dunes to their 
left. Torches on the high walls flared before them, making the city of exile an island of light. 
All food in Landin was strictly rationed now. People ate communally in one of the great buildings 
around the square, or if they chose took their rations home to their houses. The women who had been 
herding were late. After a hasty dinner in the strange building called Thiatr, Rolery went with Seiko 
Esmit to the house of the woman 
PLANET OF EXILE 
Alia Pasfal. She would rather have gone to Agat's empty house and been alone there, but she did 
whatever she was asked to do. She was no longer a girl, and no longer free. She was the wife of an an 
Alterran, and a prisoner on sufferance. For the first time in her life she obeyed. 

No fire burned in the hearth, yet the high room was warm; lamps without wicks burned in glass cages on 
the wall. In this one house, as big as a whole Kinhouse of Tevar, one old woman lived by herself. How 
did they bear the loneliness? And how did they keep the warmth and light of summer inside the walls? 
And all Year long they lived in these houses, all their lives, never wandering, never living in tents out on 
the range, on the broad Sum-merlands, wandering . . . Rolery pulled her groggy head erect and stole a 
glance at the old one, Pasfal, to see if her sleepiness had been seen. It had. The old one saw everything; 
and she hated Rolery. 
So did they all, the Alterrans, these farborn Elders. They hated her because they loved Jakob Agat with a 
jealous love; because he had taken her to wife; because she was human and they were not. 
One of them was saying something about Tevar, something very strange that she did not believe. She 
looked down, but fright must have showed hi her face, for one of the men, Dermat Alterra, stopped 
listening to the others and said, "Rolery, you didn't know that Tevar was lost?" 
"I listen," she whispered. 
"Our men were harrying the Gaal from the west all day," the farborn explained. "When the Gaal warriors 
attacked Tevar, we attacked their baggage-line and the camps their women were putting up east of the 
forest. That drew some of them off, and some of the Tevarans got out�but they and our men got 
scattered. Some of them are here now; we don't really know what the rest are doing, except it's a cold 
night and they're out there in the hills . . ." 
Rolery sat silent. She was very tired, and did not understand. The Winter City was taken, destroyed. 
Could that be 
70 
PLANET OF EXILE 
true? She had left her people; now her people were all dead, or homeless in the hills in the Winter night. 
She was left alone. The aliens talked and talked hi their hard voices. For a while Rolery had an illusion, 
which she knew for an illusion, that there was a thin film of blood on her hands and wrists. She felt a 
little sick, but was not sleepy any longer; now and then she felt herself entering the outskirts, the first 
stage, of Absence for a minute. The bright, cold eyes of the old one, Pasfal the witch, stared at her. She 
could not move. There was nowhere to go. Everyone was dead. 
Then there was a change. It was like a small light far off hi darkness. She said aloud, though so softly 
only those nearest her heard, "Agat is coming here." 
"Is he bespeaking you?" Alia Pasfal asked sharply. 

Rolery gazed for a moment at the air beside the old woman she feared; she was not seeing her. "He's 
coming here," she repeated. 
"He's probably not sending, Alia," said the one called Pilotson. "They're in steady rapport, to some 
degree." 
"Nonsense, Huru." 
"Why nonsense? He told us he sent to her very hard, on the beach, and got through; she must be a 
Natural. And that established a rapport. It's happened before." 
"Between human couples, yes," the old woman said. "An untrained child can't receive or send a 
paraverbal message, Huru; a Natural is the rarest thing in the world. And this is a hilf, not a human!" 
Rolery meanwhile had got up, slipped away from the circle and gone to the door. She opened it. Outside 
was empty darkness and the cold. She looked up the street, and in a moment could make out a man 
coming down it at a weary jogtrot. He came into the shaft of yellow light from the open door, and 
putting out his hand to catch hers, out of breath, said her name. His smile showed three front teeth gone; 
there was a blackened bandage around his head under his fur cap; he was grayish with fatigue and pain. 
He had been out hi the hills since the Gaal had entered Aska- 
71 
PLANET OF EXILE 
tevar Range, three days and two nights ago. "Get me some water to drink," he told Rolery softly, and 
then came on into the light, while the others all gathered around him. 
Rolery found the cooking-room and in it the metal reed with a flower on top which you turned to make 
water run out of the reed; Agat's house also had such a device. She saw no bowls or cups set out 
anywhere, so she caught the water in a hollow of the loose hem of her leather tunic, and brought it thus 
to her husband in the other room. He gravely drank from her tunic. The others stared and Pasfal said 
sharply, "There are cups in the cupboard." But she was a witch no longer; her malice fell like a spent 
arrow. Rolery knelt beside Agat and heard his voice. 
CHAPTER NINE: The Guerrillas 
THE WEATHER HAD warmed again after the first snow. There was sun, a little rain, northwest wind, 
light frost at night, much as it had been all the last moonphase of Autumn. Winter was not so different 
from what went before; it was a bit hard to believe the records of previous Years that told of ten-foot 
snowfalls, and whole moonphases when the ice never thawed. Maybe that came later. The problem now 
was the Gaal... 

Paying very little attention to Agat's guerillas, though he had inflicted some nasty wounds on their 
army's flanks, the northerners had poured at a fast march down through As-katevar Range, encamped 
east of the forest, and now on the third day were assaulting the Winter City. They were not destroying it, 
however; they were obviously trying to save the granaries from the fire, and the herds, and perhaps the 
women. It was only the men they slaughtered. Perhaps, as reported, they were going to try to garrison 
the place with a few of their own men. Come Spring the Gaal returning from the south could march from 
town to town of an Empire. 
It was not like the hilfs, Agat thought as he lay hidden under an immense fallen tree, waiting for his little 
army to take their positions for their own assault on Tevar. He had been in the open, fighting and hiding, 
two days and nights 
72 
73 
PLANET OF EXILE 
now. A cracked rib from the beating he had taken in the woods, though well bound up, hurt, and so did a 
shallow scaip-wound from a Gaal slingshot vesterday; but with immunity to infection wounds healed 
very fast, and Agat paid scant attention to anything less than a severed artery. Only a concussion had got 
him down at all. He was thirsty at the moment and a bit stiff, but his mind was pleasantly alert as he got 
this brief enforced rest. It wasn't like the hilfs, this planning ahead. Hilfs did not consider either time or 
space in the linear, imperialistic fashion of his own species. Time to them was a lantern lighting a step 
before, a step behind�the rest was indistinguishable dark. Time was this day, this one day of the 
immense Year. They had no historical vocabulary; there was merely today and "timepast." They looked 
ahead only to the next season at most. They did not look down over time but wer" in it as the lamp in the 
night, as the heart hi the body. And so also with space: space to them was not a surface on which to draw 
boundaries but a range, a heart1 and, centered on the self and clan and tribe. Around the Range were 
areas that brightened as one approached them and dimmed as one departed; the farther, the fainter. But 
there were no lines, no limits. This planning ahead, this trying to keep hold of a conquered place across 
both snace and time, was untypical; it showed�what? An autonomous change in a hilf culture-pattern, 
or an infection from the old northern colonies and forays of Man? 
It would be the first time, Agat thought sardonically, that they ever learned an idea from us. Next we'll 
be catching their colds. And that'll kill us off; and our ideas might well kill them off ... 
There was in him a deep and mostly unconscious bitterness against the Tevarans, who had smashed his 
head and ribs, and broken their covenant; and whom he must now watch getting slaughtered hi their 
stupid little mud city under his eyes. He had been helpless to fight against them, 
74 

PLANET Of EXILE 
now he was almost helpless to fight for them. He detested them for forcing helplessness upon him. 
At that moment�just as Rolery was starting back towards Landin behind the herds�there was a rustle 
in the dry leaf-dust hi the hollow behind him. Before the sound had ceased he had his loaded dartgun 
trained on the hollow. 
Explosives were forbidden by the Law of Cultural Embargo, which had become a basic ethos of the 
Exiles; but some native tribes, in the early Years of fighting, had used poisoned spears and darts. Freed 
by this from taboo, the doctors of Landin had developed some effective poisons which were still in the 
hunting-fighting repertory. There were stunners, paralyzers, slow and quick killers; this one was lethal 
and took five seconds to convulse the nervous system of a large animal, such as a Gaal. The mechanism 
of the dartgun was neat and simple, accurate within a little over fifty meters. "Come on out," Agat called 
to the silent hollow, and his still swollen lips stretched out in a grin. All things considered, he was ready 
to kill another hilf. 
"Alterra?" 
A hilf rose to his full height among the dead gray bushes of the hollow, his arms by his sides. It was 
Umaksuman. 
"Hell!" Agat said, lowering his gun, but not all the way. Repressed violence shook him a moment with a 
spastic shudder. 
"Alterra," the Tevaran said huskily, "in my father's tent we were friends." 
"And afterwards�in the woods?" . 
The native stood there silent, a big, heavy figure, his fair hair filthy, his face clayey with hunger and 
exhaustion. 
"I heard your voice, with the others. If you had to avenge your sister's honor, you could have done it one 
at a time." Agat's finger was still on the trigger; but when Dmaksu-man answered, his expression 
changed. He had not hoped for an answer. 
75 
PLANET OF EXILE 
PLANET OF EXILE 
"I was not with the others. I followed them, and stopped them. Five days ago I killed Ukwet, my nephew

brother, who led them. I have been in the hills since then." Agat uncocked his gun and looked away. 
"Come on up here," he said after a while. Only then did both of them realize that they had been standing 
up talking out loud, in these hills full of Gaal scouts. Agat gave a long noiseless laugh as Umaksuman 
slithered into the niche under the log with him. "Friend, enemy, what the hell," he said. "Here." He 
passed the hilf a hunk of bread from his wallet. "Rolery is my wife, since three days ago." 
Silent, Umaksuman took the bread, and ate it as a hungry man eats. 
"When they whistle from the left, over there, we're going to go hi all together, heading for that breach in 
the walls at the north corner, and make a run through the town, to pick up any Tevarans we can. The 
Gaal are looking for us around the Bogs where we were this morning, not here. It's the only tune we're 
going for the town. You want to come?" 
Umaksuman nodded. "Are you armed?" 
Umaksuman lifted his ax. Side by side, not speaking, they crouched watching the burning roofs, the 
tangles and spurts of motion in the wrecked alleys of the little town on the hill facing them. A gray sky 
was closing off the sunlight; smoke was acrid on the wind. 
Off to then- left a whistle shrilled. The hillsides west and north of Tevar sprang alive with men, little 
scattered figures crouch-running down into the vale and up the slope, piling over the broken wall and 
into the wreckage and confusion of the town. 
As the men of Landin met at the wajl they joined into squads of five to twenty men, and these squads 
kept together, whether in attacking groups of Gaal looters with dartguns, bolos and knives, or in picking 
up whatever Tev-aran women and children they found and making for the 
76 
gate with them. They went so fast and sure that they might have rehearsed the raid; the Gaal, occupied hi 
cleaning out the last resistance in the town, were taken off guard. 
Agat and Umaksuman kept pace, and a group of eight or ten coalesced with them as they ran through the 
Stone-Pounding Square, then down a narrow tunnel-alley to a lesser square, and burst into one of the big 
Kinhouses. One after another leapt down the earthen stairway into the dark ulterior. White-faced men 
with red plumes twined hi their horn-like hair came yelling and swinging axes, defending their loot. The 
dart from Agat's gun shot straight into the open mouth of one; he saw Umaksuman take the arm off a 
Gaal's shoulder as an axman lops a branch from a tree. Then there was silence. Women crouched in 
silence in the half-darkness. A baby bawled and bawled. "Come with us!" Agat shouted. Some of the 
women moved towards him, and seeing him, stopped. 
Umaksuman loomed up beside him in the dun light from the doorway, heavy laden with some burden on 
his back. "Come, bring the children!" he roared, and at the sound of his known voice they all moved. 

Agat got them grouped at the stairs with his men strung out to protect them, then gave the word. They 
broke from the Kinhouse and made for the gate. No Gaal stopped their run�a queer bunch of women, 
children, men, led by Agat with a Gaal ax running cover for Umaksuman, who carried on his shoulders a 
great dangling burden, the old chief, his father Wold. 
They made it out the gate, ran the gauntlet of a Gaal troop in the old tenting-place, and with other such 
flying squads of Landin men and refugees hi front of them and behind them, scattered into the woods. 
The whole run through Tevar had taken about five minutes. 
There was no safety in the forest. Gaal scouts and troops were scattered along the road to Landin. The 
refugees and rescuers fanned out singly and in pairs southward into the woods. Agat stayed with 
Umaksuman, who could not defend himself carrying the old man. They struggled through 
77 
PLANET OF EXILE 
the underbrush. No enemy met them among the gray aisles and hummocks, the fallen trunks and tangled 
dead branches and mummied bushes. Somewhere far behind them a woman's voice screamed and 
screamed. 
It took them a long time to work south and west in a half-circle through the forest, over the ridges and 
back north at last to Landin. When Umaksuman could not go any farther, Wold walked, but he could go 
only very slowly. When they came out of the trees at last they saw the lights of the City of Exile flaring 
far off in the windy dark above the sea. Half-dragging the old man, they struggled along the hillside and 
came to the Land Gate. 
"Hilfs coming!" Guards sang out before they got within clear sight, spotting Umaksuman's fair hair. 
Then they saw Agat and the voices cried, "The Alterra, the Alterra!" 
They came to meet him and brought him into the city, men who had fought beside him, taken his orders, 
saved his skin for these three days of guerilla-fighting hi the woods and hills. 
They had done what they could, four hundred of them against an enemy that swarmed like the vast 
migrations of the beasts�fifteen thousand men. Agat had guessed. Fifteen thousand warriors, between 
sixty or seventy thousand Gaal hi all, with their tents and cookpots and travois and hann and fur rugs and 
axes and armlets and cradleboards and tinderboxes, all their scant belongings, and their fear of the 
Whiter, and their hunger. He had seen Gall women in their encampments gathering the dead lichen off 
logs and eating it. It did not seem probable that the little City of Exile still stood, untouched by this flood 
of violence and hunger, with torches alight above its gates of iron and carved wood, and men to 
welcome him home. 
Trying to tell the story of the last three days, he said, "We came around behind their line of march, 

yesterday afternoon." The words had no reality; neither had this warm room, the faces of men and 
women he had known all his life, listening to him. "The ... the ground behind 
78 
PLANET OF EXILE 
them, where the whole migration had come down some of the narrow valleys�it looked like the ground 
after a landslide. Raw dirt. Nothing. Everything trodden to dust, to nothing . . ." 
"How can they keep going? What do they eat?" Huru muttered. 
"The Whiter stores in the cities they take. The land's all stripped by now, the crops are in, the big game 
gone south. They must loot every town on their course and live off the hann-herds, or starve before they 
get out of the snow-lands." 
"Then they'll come here," one of the Alterrans said quietly. 
"I think so. Tomorrow or next day." This was true, but it was not real either. He passed his hand over his 
face, feeling the dirt and stiffness and the unhealed soreness of his lips. He had felt he must come make 
his report to the government of his city, but now he was so tired that he could not say anything more, 
and did not hear what they were saying. He turned to Rolery, who knelt in silence beside him. Not 
raising her amber eyes, she said very softly, "You should go home, Alterra." 
He had not thought of her ah1 those endless hours of fighting and running and shooting and hiding in the 
woods. He had known her for two weeks; had talked with her at any length perhaps three times; had lam 
with her once; had taken her as his wife hi the Hall of Law in the early morning three days ago, and an 
hour later had left to go with the guerillas. He knew nothing much about her, and she was not even of his 
species. And in a couple of days more they would probably both be dead. He gave his noiseless laugh 
and put his hand gently on hers. "Yes, take me home," he said. Silent, delicate, alien, she rose, and 
waited for him as he took his leave of the others. 
He had told her that Wold and Umaksuman, with about two hundred more of her people, had escaped or 
been res- 
79 
PLANET OF EXILE 
cued from the violated Winter City and were now in refugee quarters in Landin. She had not asked to go 
to them. As they went up the steep street together from Alla's house to his, she asked, "Why did you 
enter Tevar to save the people?" 

"Why?" It seemed a strange question to him. "Because they wouldn't save themselves." 
"That's no reason, Alterra." 
She seemed submissive, the shy native wife who did her lord's will. Actually, he was learning, she was 
stubborn, willful, and very proud. She spoke softly, but said exactly what she meant. 
"It is a reason, Rolery. You can't just sit there watching the bastards kill off people slowly. Anyhow, I 
want to fight �to fight back . . ." 
"But your town: how do you feed these people you brought here? If the Gaal lay siege, or afterwards, in 
Winter?" 
"We have enough. Food's not our worry. All we need is men." 
He stumbled a little from weariness. But the clear cold night had cleared his mind, and he felt the rising 
of a small spring of joy that he had not felt for a long time. He had some sense that this little relief, this 
lightness of spirit, was given him by her presence. He had been responsible for everything so long. She 
the stranger, the foreigner, of alien blood and mind, did not share his power or his conscience or his 
knowledge or his exile. She shared nothing at all with him, but had met him and joined with him wholly 
and immediately across the gulf of their great difference: as if it were that difference, the alienness 
between them, that let them meet, and that in joining them together, freed them. 
They entered his unlocked front door. No light burned in the high narrow house of roughly dressed 
stone. It had stood here for three Years, a hundred and eighty moon-phases; his great-grandfather had 
been born in it, and his grandfather, and his father, and himself. It was as familiar 
PLANET OF EXILE 
to him as his own body. To enter it with her, the nomad woman whose only home would have been this 
tent or that on one hillside or another, or the teeming burrows under the snow, gave him a peculiar 
pleasure. He felt a tenderness towards her which he hardly knew how to express. Without intent he said 
her name not aloud but paraver-bally. At once she turned to him in the darkness of the hall; in the 
darkness, she looked into his face* The house and city were silent around them. In his mind he heard her 
say his own name, like a whisper in the night, like a touch across the abyss. 
"You bespoke me," he said aloud, unnerved, marveling. She said nothing but once more he heard hi his 
mind, along his blood and nerves, her mind that reached out to him: Agat, Agat ... 
80 
81 

CHAPTER TEN: The Old Chief 
THE OLD CHIEF was tough. He survived stroke, concussion, exhaustion, exposure, and disaster with 
intact will, and nearly intact intelligence. 
Some things he did not understand, and others were not present to his mind at all times. He was if 
anything glad to be out of the stuffy darkness of the Kinhouse, where sitting by the fire had made such a 
woman of him; he was quite clear about that. He liked�he had always liked�this rock-founded, sunlit, 
windswept city of the farborns, built before anybody alive was born and still standing changeless in the 
same place. It was a much better built city than Tevar. About Tevar he was not always clear. Sometimes 
he remembered the yells, the burning roofs, the hacked and disemboweled corpses of his sons and 
grandsons. Sometimes he did not. The will to survive was very strong in him. 
Other refugees trickled in, some of them from sacked Winter Cities to the north; in all there were now 
about three hundred of Wold's race in the farborns' town. It was so strange to be weak, to be few, to live 
on the charity of pariahs, that some of the Tevarans, particularly among the middle-aged men, could not 
take it. They sat in Absence, legs crossed, the pupils of their eyes shrunk to a dot, as if they had been 
rubbing themselves with gesin oil. 
82 
PLANET OF EXILE 
Some of the women, too, who had seen their men cut into gobbets in the streets and by the hearths of 
Tevar, or who had lost children, grieved themselves into sickness or Absence. But to Wold the collapse 
of the Tevaran world was only part of the collapse of his own life. Knowing that he was very far along 
the way to death, he looked with great benevolence on each day and on all younger men, human or 
farborn: they were the ones who had to keep fighting. 
Sunlight shone now in the stone streets, bright on the painted housefronts, though there was a vague 
dirty smear along the sky above the dunes northward. In the great square, in front of the house called 
Thiatr where all the humans were quartered, Wold was hailed by a farborn. It took him a while to 
recognize Jaokob Agat. Then he cackled a bit and said, "Alterra! you used to be a handsome fellow. You 
look like a Pernmek shaman with his front teeth pulled. Where is ... (he forgot her name) where's my 
kinswoman?" 
"In my house, Eldest." 
"This is shameful," Wold said. He did not care if he offended Agat. Agat was his lord and leader now, of 
course; but the fact remained that it was shameful to keep a mistress in one's own tent or house. Farborn 
or not, Agat should observe the fundamental decencies. 
"She's my wife. Is that the shame?" 

"I hear wrongly, my ears are old," Wold said, wary. 
"She is my wife." 
Wold looked up, meeting Agat's gaze straight on for the first time. Wold's eyes were dull yellow like the 
whiter sun, and no white showed under the slanting lids. Agat's eyes were dark, iris and pupil dark, 
white-cornered in the dark face: strange eyes to meet the gaze of, unearthly. 
Wold looked away. The great stone houses of the farborns stood all about him, clean and bright and 
ancient in the sunlight. 
"I took a wife from you, Farborn," he said at last, "but I 
83 
PLANET OF EXILE 
never thought you'd take one from me ... Wold's daughter married among the false-men, to bear no sons 
�" 
"You've got no cause to mourn," the young farborn said unmoving, set as a rock. "I am your equal, 
Wold. In all but age. You had a farborn wife once. Now you've got a farborn son-in-law. If you wanted 
one you can swallow the other." 
"It is hard," the old man said with dour simplicity. There was a pause. "We are not equals, Jakob Agat. 
My people are dead or broken. You are a chief, a lord. I am not. But I am a man, and you are not. What 
likeness between us?" 
"At least no grudge, no hate," Agat said? still unmoving. 
Wold looked about him and at last, slowly, shrugged assent. 
"Good, then we can die well together," the farborn said with his surprising laugh. You never knew when 
a farborn was going to laugh. "I think the Gaal will attack in a few hours, Eldest." 
"In a few�?" 
"Soon. When the sun's-high maybe." They were standing by the empty arena. A light discus lay 
abandoned by their feet. Agat picked it up and without intent, boyishly, sailed it across the arena. Gazing 
where it fell he said, "There's about twenty of them to one of us. So if they get over the walls or through 
the gate . . . I'm sending all the Fall-born children and their mothers out to the Stack. With the 
drawbridges raised there's no way to take it, and it's got water and supplies to last five hundred people 

about a moon-phase. There ought to be some men with the womenfolk. Will you choose three or four of 
your men, and the women with young children, and take them there?" They must have a chief. Does this 
plan seem good to you?" 
"Yes. But I will stay here," the old man said. 
"Very well, Eldest," Agat said without a flicker of protest, his harsh, scarred young face impassive. 
"Please choose the men to go with your women and children. They should go very soon. Kemper will 
take our group out." 
PLANET OF EXILE 
"I'll go with them," Wold said in exactly the same tone, and Agat looked just a trifle disconcerted. So it 
was possible to disconcert him. But he agreed quietly. His deference to Wold was courteous pretense, of 
course�what reason had he to defer to a dying man who even among his own defeated tribe was no 
longer a chief?�but he stuck with it no matter how foolishly Wold replied. He was truly a rock. There 
were not many men like that. "My lord, my son, my like," the old man said with a grin, putting his hand 
on Agat's shoulder, "send me where you want me. I have no more use, all I can do is die. Your black 
rock looks like an evil place to die, but I'll do it there if you want. . ." 
"Send a few men to stay with the women, anyway," Agat said, "good steady ones that can keep the 
women from panicking. I've got to go up to the Land Gate, Eldest. Will you come?" 
Agat, lithe and quick, was off. Leaning on a farborn spear of bright metal, Wold made his way slowly up 
the streets and steps. But when he was only halfway he had to stop for breath, and then realized that he 
should turn back and send the young mothers and their brats out to the island, as Agat had asked. He 
turned and started down. When he saw how his feet shuffled on the stones he knew that he should obey 
Agat and go with the women to the black island, for he would only be in the way here. 
The bright streets were empty except for an occasional farborn hurrying purposefully by. They were all 
ready or getting ready, at their posts and duties. If the clansmen of Tevar had been ready, if they had 
marched north to meet the Gaal, if they had looked ahead into a coming time the way Agat seemed to 
do . . . No wonder people called far-borns witchmen. But then, it was Agat's fault that they had not 
marched. He had let a woman come between allies. If he, Wold, had known that the girl had ever spoken 
again to Agat, he would have had her killed behind the tents, and her body thrown into the sea, and 
Tevar might still be 
85 
PLANET OF EXILE 
standing . . . She came out of the door of a high stone house, and seeing Wold, stood still. 

He noticed that though she had tied back her hair as married women did, she still wore leather tunic and 
breeches stamped with the trifoliate dayflower, clan-mark of his Kin. 
They did not look into each other's eyes. 
She did not speak. Wold said at last�for past was past, and he had called Agat "son"�"Do you go to 
the black island or stay here, kinswoman?" 
"I stay here, Eldest." 
"Agat sends me to the black island," he said, a little vague, shifting his stiff weight as he stood there in 
the cold sunlight, in his bloodstained furs, leaning on the spear. 
"I think Agat fears the women won't go unless you lead them, you or Umaksuman. And Umaksuman 
leads our warriors, guarding the north wall." 
She had lost all her lightness, her aimless, endearing insolence; she was urgent and gentle. All at once he 
recalled her vividly as a little child, the only little one hi all the Sum-merlands, Shakatany's daughter, the 
summer-born. "So you are the Alterra's wife?" he said, and this idea coming on top of the memory of her 
as a wild, laughing child confused him again so he did not hear what she answered. 
"Why don't all of us in the city go to the island, if it can't be taken?" 
"Not enough water, Eldest. The Gaal would move into this city, and we would die on the rock." 
He could see, across the roofs of the League Hall, a glimpse of the causeway. The tide was in; waves 
glinted beyond the black shoulder of the island fort. 
"A house built upon sea-water is no house for men," he said heavily. "It's too close to the land under the 
sea ... Listen now, there was a thing I meant to say to Arilia�to Agat. Wait. What was it, I've forgotten. 
I can't hear my mind . . ." He pondered, but nothing came. "Well, no matter. Old men's thoughts are like 
dust. Goodbye, daughter." 
86 
PLANET OF EXILE 
He went on, shuffling halt and ponderous across the Square to the Thiatr, where he ordered the young 
mothers to collect their children and come. Then he led his last foray�a flock of cowed women and 
little crying children, following him and the three younger men he chose to come with him, across the 
vasty dizzy air-road to the black and terrible house. 
It was cold there, and silent. In the high vaults of the rooms there was no sound at all but the sound of 

the sea sucking and mouthing at the rocks below. His people huddled together all hi one huge room. He 
wished old Kerly were there, she would have been a help, but she was lying dead hi Tevar or in the 
forests. A couple of courageous women got the others going at last; they found grain to make bhanmeal, 
water to boil it, wood to boil the water. When the women and children of the farborns came with their 
guard of ten men, the Tevarans could offer them hot food. Now there were five or six hundred people in 
the fort, filling it up pretty full, so it echoed with voices and there were brats underfoot everywhere, 
almost like the women's side of a Kinhouse in the Winter City. But from the narrow windows, through 
the transparent rock that kept out the wind, one looked down and down to the water spouting on the 
rocks below, the waves smoking hi the wind. 
The wind was turning and the dirtiness in the northern sky had become a haze, so that around the little 
pale sun there hung a great pale circle: the snowcircle. That was it, that was what he had meant to tell 
Agat. It was going to snow. Not a shake of salt like last time, but snow, winter snow. The blizzard . . . 
The word he had not heard or said for so long made him feel strange. To die, then, he must return across 
the bleak, changeless landscape of his boyhood, he must reenter the white world of the storms. 
He still stood at the window, but did not see the noisy water below. He was remembering Winter. A lot 
of good it would do the Gaal to have taken Tevar, and Landin too. 
87 
PLANET OF EXILE 
Tonight and tomorrow they could feast on hann and grain. But how far would they get, when the snow 
began to fall? The real snow, the blizzard that leveled the forests and rilled the valleys; and the winds 
that followed, bitter cold. They would run when that enemy came down the roads at them! They had 
stayed North too long. Wold suddenly cackled out loud, and turned from the darkening window. He had 
out-lived his chiefdom, his sons, his use, and had to die here on a rock in the sea; but he had great allies, 
and great warriors served him�greater than Agat, or any man. Storm and Winter fought for him, and he 
would outlive his enemies. 
He strode ponderously to the hearth, undid his gesin-pouch, dropped a tiny fragment on the coals and 
inhaled three deep breaths. After that he bellowed, "Well, women! Is the slop ready?" Meekly they 
served him; contentedly he ate. 
88 
CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Siege of the City 
ALL THE FIRST DAY of the siege Rolery's job had been with those who kept the men on the walls and 
roofs supplied with lances�long, crude, unfinished slivers of holn-grass weighing a couple of pounds, 
one end slashed to a long point. Well aimed, one would kill, and even from unskilled hands a rain of 
them was a good deterrent to a group of Gaal trying to raise a ladder against the curving landward wall. 

She had brought bundles of these lances up endless stairs, passed them up as one of a chain of passers on 
other stairs, run with them through the windy streets, and her hands still bristled with hair-thin, stinging 
splinters. But now since daybreak she had been hauling rocks for the katapuls, the rock-throwing-things 
like huge slingshots, which were set up inside the Land Gate. When the Gaal crowded up to the gate" to 
use their rams, the big rocks whizzing and whacking down among tern scattered and rescattered them. 
But to feed the katapuls took an awful pile of rocks. Boys kept at work prising paving-stones up from 
the nearby streets, and her crew of women ran these eight or ten at a time on a little roundlegged box to 
the men working the katapuls. Eight women pulled together, harnessed to ropes. The heavy box with its 
dead load of stone would seem immovable, until at last as they all pulled its round legs would suddenly 
turn, and with it clattering 
89 
PLANET OF EXILE 
and jolting behind, they would pull it uphill to the gate all in one straining rush, dump it, then stand 
panting a minute and wipe the hair out of their eyes, and drag the bucking, empty cart back for more. 
They had done this all morning. Rocks and ropes had blistered Rolery's hard hands raw. She had torn 
squares from her thin leather skirt and bound them on her palms with sandal-thongs; it helped, and 
others imitated her. 
"I wish you hadn't forgotten how to make erkars," she shouted to Seiko Esmit once as they came 
clattering down the street at a run with the unwieldy cart jouncing behind them. Seiko did not answer; 
perhaps she did not hear. She kept at this grueling work�there seemed to be no soft ones among the 
farborns�but the strain they were under told on Seiko; she worked like one in a trance. Once as they 
neared the gate the Gaal began shooting fire-brands that fell smoking and smoldering on the stones and 
the tile roofs. Seiko had struggled in the ropes like a beast in a snare, cowering as the flamingo things 
shot over. "They go out, this city won't burn," Rolery had said softly, but Seiko turning her unseeing 
face had said, "I'm afraid of fire, I'm afraid of fire . . ." 
But when a young crossbowman up on the wall, struck in the face by a Gaal slingshot, had been thrown 
backwards off his narrow ledge and crashed down spread-eagled beside them, knocking over two of the 
harnessed women and, spattering their skirts with his blood and brains, it had been Seiko that went to 
him and took that smashed head on her knees, whispering goodbye to the dead man. "That was your 
kinsman?" Rolery asked as Seiko resumed her harness and they went on. The Alterran woman said, "We 
are all kinsman hi the City. He was Jonkendy Li�the youngest of the Council." 
A young wrestler in the arena in the great square, shining with sweat and triumph, telling her to walk 
where she liked in his city. He was the first farborn that had spoken to her. 
90 
PLANET OF EXILE 

She had not seen Jakob Agat since the night before last, for each person, human and farborn, left in 
Landin had his job and place, and Agat's was everywhere, holding a city of fifteen hundred against a 
force of fifteen thousand. As the day wore on and weariness and hunger lowered her strength, she began 
to see him too sprawled out on bloody stones, down at the other main attack-point, the Sea Gate above 
the cliffs. Her crew stopped work to eat bread and dried fruit brought by a cheerful lad hauling a 
roundleg-cart of provisions; a serious little maiden lugging a skin of water gave them to drink. Rolery 
took heart. She was certain that they would all die, for she had seen, from the rooftops, the enemy 
blackening the hills: there was no end to them, they had hardly begun the siege yet. She was equally 
certain that Agat could not be killed, and that since he would live, she would live. What had death to do 
with him? He was life; her life. She sat on the cobbled street comfortable chewing hard bread. 
Mutilation, rape, torture and horror encompassed her within a stone's throw on all sides, but there she sat 
chewing her bread. So long as they fought back with all their strength, with all their heart, as they were 
doing, they were safe at least from fear. 
But not long after came a very bad time. As they dragged their lumbering load towards the gate, the 
sound of the clattering cart and all sounds were drowned out by an incredible howling noise outside the 
gate, a roar like that of an earthquake, so deep and loud as to be felt in the bone, not heard. And the gate 
leaped on its iron hinges, shuddering. She saw Agat then, for a moment. He was running, leading a big 
group of archers and dartgunners up from the lower part of town, yelling orders to another group on the 
walls as he ran. 
All the women scattered, ordered to take refuge in streets nearer the center of town. Howw, howw, 
howw! went the crowd-voice at the Land Gate, a noise so huge it seemed the hills themselves were 
making it, and would 
PLANET OF EXILE 
rise and shake the city off the cliffs into the sea. The wind was bitter cold. Her crew was scattered, all 
was confusion. She had no work to lay her hand to. It was getting dark. The day was not that old, it was 
not time yet for darkness. All at once she saw that she was in fact going to die, believed hi her death; she 
stood still and cried out under her breath, there hi the empty street between the high, empty houses. 
On a side street a few boys were prising up stones and carrying them down to build up the barricades 
that had been built across the four streets that led into the main square, reinforcing the gates. She joined 
them, to keep warm, to keep doing something. They labored in silence, five or six of them, doing work 
too heavy for them. 
"Snow," one of them said, pausing near her. She looked up from the stone she was pushing foot by foot 
down the street, and saw the white flakes whirling before her, falling thicker every moment. They all 
stood still. Now there was no wind, and the monstrous voice howling at the gate fell silent. Snow and 
darkness came together, bringing silence. 

"Look at it," a boy's voice said hi wonder. Already they could not see the end of the street. A feeble 
yellowish glimmer was the light from the League Hall, only a block away. 
"We've got all Whiter to look at the stuff," said another lad. "If we live that long. Come on! They must 
be passing out supper at the Hall." 
"You coming?" the youngest one said to Rolery. 
"My people are in the other house, Thiatr, I think." 
"No, we're all eating hi the Hall, to save work, Come on." The boys were shy, gruff, comradely. She 
went with them. 
The night had come early; the day came late. She woke in Agat's house, beside him, and saw gray light 
on the gray walls, slits of dimness leaking through the shutters that hid the glass windows. Everything 
was still, entirely still. Inside the house and outside it there was no noise at 
92 
PLANET OF EXILE 
all. How could a besieged city be so silent? But siege and Gaals seemed very far off, kept away by this 
strange daybreak hush. Here there was warmth, and Agat beside her lost hi sleep. She lay very still. 
Knocking downstairs, hammering at the door, voices. The charm broke; the best moment passed. They 
were calling Agat. She roused him, a hard job; at last, still blind with sleep, he got himself on his feet 
and opened window and shutter, letting in the light of day. 
The third day of seige, the first of storm. Snow lay a foot deep in the streets and was still falling, 
ceaseless, sometimes thick and calm, mostly driving on a hard north wind. Everything was silenced and 
transformed by snow. Hills, forest, fields, all were gone; there was no sky. The near rooftops faded off 
into white. There was fallen snow, and falling snow, for a little ways, and then you could not see at all. 
Westward, the tide drew back and back into the silent storm. The causeway curved out into void. The 
Stack could not be seen. No sky, no sea. Snow drove down over the dark cliffs, hiding the sands. 
Agat latched shutter and window and turned to her. His face was still relaxed with sleep, his voice was 
hoarse. "They can't have gone," he muttered. For that was what they had been calling up to him from the 
street: "The Gaal have gone, they've pulled out, they're running south . * ." 
There was no telling. From the walls of Landin nothing could be seen but the storm. But a little way 
farther into the storm there might be a thousand tents set up to weather it out; or there might be none. 

A few scouts went over the walls on ropes. Three returned saying they had gone up the ridge to the 
forest and found no Gaal; but they had come back because they could not see even the city itself from a 
hundred yards off. One never came back. Captured, or lost in the storm? 
The Alterrans met in the library of the Hall; as was customary, any citizen who wished came to hear and 
deliber- 
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ate with them. The Council of the Alterrans was eight now, not ten. Jonkendy Li was dead and so was 
Haris, the youngest and the oldest. There were only seven present, for Pilotson was on guard duty. But 
the room was crowded with silent listeners. 
"They're not gone . . . They're not close to the city . . . Some . . . some are . . ." Alia Pasfal spoke thickly, 
the pulse throbbed in her neck, her face was muddy gray. She was best trained of all the f arborns at 
what they called mindhearing: she could hear men's thoughts farther than any other, and could listen to a 
mind, that did not know she heard it. 
That is forbidden, Agat had said long ago�a week ago? �and he had spoken against this attempt to 
find out if the Gaal were still encamped near Landin. "We've never broken that law," he said, "never in 
all the Exile." And he said, "We'll know where the Gaal are as soon as the snow lets up; meanwhile we'll 
keep watch." 
But others did not agree with him, and they overrode his will. Rolery was confused and distressed when 
she saw him withdraw, accepting their choice. He had tried to explain to her why he must; he said he 
was not the chief of the city or the Council, that ten Alterrans were chosen and ruled together, but it all 
made no sense to Rolery. Either he was their leader or he was not; and if he was not, they were lost. 
Now the old woman writhed, her eyes unseeing, and tried to speak in words her unspeakable halfglimpses 
into alien minds whose thoughts were in an alien speech, her brief inarticulate grasp of what 
another being's hands touched�"I hold�I hold�1-line�rope�" she stammered. 
Rolery shivered in fear and distaste; Agat sat turned from Alia, withdrawn. 
At last Alia was still, and sat for a long time with bowed head. 
Seiko Esmit poured out for each of the seven Alterrans 
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and Rolery the tiny ceremonial cup of ti; each, barely touching it with his lips, passed it on to a fellowcitizen, 
and he to another till it was empty. Rolery looked fascinated at the bowl Agat gave to her, before 
she drank and passed it on. Blue, leaf-frail, it let the light pass through it like a jewel. 
"The Gaal have gone," Alia Pasfal said aloud, raising her ravaged face. "They are on the move now, in 
some valley between two ranges�that came very clear." 
"Giln Valley," one of the men murmured. "About ten kilos south from the Bogs." 
"They are fleeing from the Winter. The walls of the city are safe." 
"But the law is broken," Agat said, his hoarsened voice cutting across the murmur of hope and 
jubilation. "Walls can be mended. Well, we'll see . . ." 
Rolery went with him down the stair case and through the vast Assembly Room, crowded now with 
trestles and tables, for the communal dining-hall was there under the golden clocks and the crystal 
patterns of planets circling their suns. "Let's go home," he said, and pulling on the big hooded furcoats 
that had been issued to everyone from the storerooms underneath the Old Hall, they went out together 
into the blinding wind in the Square. They had not gone ten steps when out of the blizzard a grotesque 
figure plastered with red-streaked white burst on them, shouting, "The Sea Gate, they're inside the walls, 
at the Sea Gate�" 
Agat glanced once at Rolery and was gone into the storm. In a moment the clangor of metal on metal 
broke out from the tower overhead, booming, snow-muffled. They called that great noise the bell, and 
before the siege began had all learned its signals. Four, five strokes, then silence, then five again, and 
again: all men to the Sea Gate, the Sea Gate . . . 
Rolery dragged the messenger out of the way, under the arcades of the League Hall, before men came 
bursting from the doors, coatless or struggling into their coats as 
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they ran, armed and unarmed, pelting into the whirling snow, vanishing in it before they were across the 
Square. No more came. She could hear some noise in the direction of the Sea Gate, seeming very remote 
through the sound of the wind and the hushing of the snow. The messenger leaned on her, in the shelter 
of the arcade. He was bleeding from a deep wound in his neck, and would have fallen if she had let him. 
She recognized his face; he was the Alterran called Pilotson, and she used his name to rouse him and 
keep him going as she tried to get him inside the building. He staggered with weakness and muttered as 
if still trying to deliver his message, "They broke in, they're inside the walls . . ." 

96 
CHAPTER TWELVE: The Siege of the Square 
THE HIGH, narrow Sea Gate clashed to, the bolts shot home. The battle in the storm was over. But the 
men of the city turned and saw, over the red-stained drifts in the street and through the still-falling snow, 
shadows running. 
They took up their dead and wounded hastily and returned to the Square. In this blizzard no watch could 
be kept against ladders, climbers; you could not see along the walls more than fifteen feet to either hand. 
A Gaal or a group of them had slipped in, right under the noses of the guards, and opened the Sea Gate 
to the assault. That assault had been driven out, but the next one could come anywhere, at any time, in 
greater force. 
"I think," Umaksuman said, walking with Agat towards the barricade between the Thiatr and the 
College, "that most of the Gaal went on south today." 
Agat nodded. "They must have. If they don't move on they starve. What we face now is an occupying 
force left behind to finish us off and live on our stores. How many do you think?" 
"Not more than a thousand were there at the gate," the native said doubtfully. "But there may be more. 
And they'll all be inside the walls�There!" Umaksuman pointed to a quick cowering shape that the 
snow-curtains revealed for a moment halfway up the street. "You that way," the native 
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muttered and vanished abruptly to the left. Agat circled the block from the right, and met Umaksuman in 
the street again. "No luck," he said. 
"Luck," the Tevaran said briefly, and held up a bone-inlaid Gaal ax which he had not had a minute ago. 
Over their heads the bell of the Hall tower kept sending out its soft dull clanging through the snow: one, 
two�one, two� one, two�Retreat to the Square, to the Square . . . All who had fought at the Sea Gate, 
and those who had been patrolling the walls and the Land Gate, or asleep in their houses or trying to 
watch from the roofs, had come or were coming to the city's heart, the Square between the four great 
buildings. One by one they were let through the barricades. Imaksuman and Agat came along at last, 
knowing it was folly to stay out now in these streets where shadows ran. "Let's go, Alterra!" the native 
urged him, and Agat came, but reluctantly. It was hard to leave his city to the enemy. 
The wind was down now. Sometimes, through the queer complex hush of the storm, people in the 
Square could hear glass shattering, the splintering of an ax against a door, up one of the streets that led 
off into the falling snow. Many of the houses had been left unlocked, open to the looters: they would 

find very little in them beyond shelter from the snow. Every scrap of food had been turned in to the 
Commons here in the Hall a week ago. The water-mains and the natural-gas mains to all buildings 
except the four around the Square had been shut off last night. The fountains of Landin stood dry, under 
their rings of icicles and burdens of snow. All stores and granaries were underground, in the vaults and 
cellars dug generations ago beneath the Old Hall and the League Hall. Empty, icy, light-less, the 
deserted houses stood, offering nothing to the invaders. 
"They can live off our herds for a moonphase�even without feed for them, they'll slaughter the hann 
and dry 
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the meat�" Dermat Alterra had met Agat at the very door of the League Hall, full of panic and reproach. 
"They'll have to catch the hann first," Agat growled in reply. 
"What do you mean?" 
"I mean that we opened the byres a few minutes ago, while we were there at the Sea Gate, and let 'em 
go. Paol Herdsman was with me and he sent out a panic. They ran like a shot, right out into the blizzard." 
"You let the hann go�the herds? What do we live on the rest of the winter�if the Gaal leave?" 
"Did Paol mindsending to the hann panic you too, Dermat?" Agat fired at him. "D'you think we can't 
round up our own animals? What about our grain stores, hunting, snowcrop�what the devil's wrong 
with you!" 
"Jakob," murmured Seiko Esmit, coming between him and the older man. He realized he had been 
yelling at Dermat, and tried to get hold of himself. But it was damned hard to come in from a bloody 
fight like that defense of the Sea Gate and have to cope with a case of male hysteria. His head ached 
violently; the scalp wound he had got in one of their raids on the Gaal camp still hurt, though it should 
have healed already; he had got off unhurt at the Sea Gate, but he was filthy with other men's blood. 
Against the high, unshuttered windows of the library the snow streaked and whispered. It was noon; it 
seemed dusk. Beneath the windows lay the Square with its well-guarded barricades. Beyond those lay 
the abandoned houses, the defenseless waLls, the city of snow and shadows. 
That day of their retreat to the Inner City, the fourth day of seige, they stayed inside then- barricades; but 
already that night, when the snowfall thinned for a while, a reconnoitering party slipped out via the roofs 
of the College. The blizzard grew worse again around daybreak, or a second storm perhaps followed 
right on the first, and under cover of the snow and cold the men and boys of Landin 

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PLANET OF EXILE 
played guerrilla in their own streets. They went out by twos or threes, prowling the streets and roofs and 
rooms, shadows among the shadows. They used knives, poisoned darts, bolos, arrows. They broke into 
their own homes and killed the Gaal who sheltered there, or were killed by them. 
Having a good head for heights, Agat was one of the best at playing the game from roof to roof. Snow 
made the steep-pitched tiles pretty slippery, but the chance to pick off Gaal with darts was irresistible, 
and the chances of getting killed no higher than in other versions of the sport, streetcorner dodging or 
house-haunting. 
The sixth day of seige, the fourth of storm: this day the snowfall was fine, sparse, wind-driven. 
Thermometers down hi the basement Records Room of the old Hall, which they were using now as a 
hospital, read �4C. outside, and the anemometers showed gusts well over a hundred kmh. Outside it 
was terrible, the wind lashing that fine snow at one's face like gravel, whirling it in through the smashed 
glass of windows whose shutters had been torn off to build a campfire, drifting it across splintered 
floors. There was little warmth and little food anywhere in the city, except inside the four buildings 
around the Square. The Gaal huddled in empty rooms, burning mats and broken doors and shutters and 
chests in the middle of the floor, waiting out the storm. They had no provisions�what food there was 
had gone with the Southing. When the weather changed they would be able to hunt, and finish off the 
townsfolk, and thereafter live on the city's winter stores. But while the storm lasted, the attackers starved. 
They held the causeway, if it was any good to them. Watchers in the League Tower had seen their one 
hesitant foray out to the Stack, which ended promptly in a rain of lances and a raised draw-bridge. Very 
few of them had been seen venturing on the low-tide beaches below the cliffs of Landin; probably they 
had seen the tide come roaring in, and had no idea how often and when it would come next, 
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PLANET OF EXILE 
for they were inlanders. So the Stack was safe, and some of the trained paraverbalists in the city had 
been in touch with one or another of the men and women out on the island, enough to know they were 
getting on well, and to tell anxious fathers that there were no children sick. The Stack was all right. But 
the city was breached, invaded, occupied; more than a hundred of its people already killed in its defense, 
and the rest trapped in a few buildings. A city of snow, and shadows, and blood. 
Jakob Agat crouched in a gray-walled room. It was empty except for a litter of torn felt matting and 
broken glass over which fine snow had sifted. The house was silent. There under the windows where the 
pallet had been, he and Rolery had slept one night; she had waked him in the morning. Crouching there, 
a housebreaker in his own house, he thought of Rolery with bitter tenderness. Once�it seemed far back 

hi time, twelve days ago maybe�he had said hi this same room thet he could not get on without her; and 
now he had no time day or night even to think of her. Then let me think of her now, at least think of her, 
he said ragefully to the silence; but all he could think was that she and he had been born at the wrong 
time. In the wrong season. You cannot begin a love hi the beginning of the season of death. 
Wind whistled peevishly at the broken windows. Agat shivered. He had been hot all day, when he was 
not freezing cold. The thermometer was still dropping, and a lot of the rooftop guerillas were having 
trouble with what the old men said was frostbite. He felt better if he kept moving. Thinking did no good. 
He started for the door out of a life-tune's habit, then getting hold of himself went softly to the window 
by which he had entered. In the ground-floor room of the house next door a group of Gaal were camped. 
He could see the back of one near the window. They were a fair people; their hair was darkened and 
made stiff with some kind of pitch or tar, but the bowed, muscular neck Agat looked down on was 
white. It was strange how little 
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chance he had had actually to see his enemies. You shot from a distance, or struck and ran, or as at the 
Sea Gate fought too close and fast to look. He wondered if their eyes were yellowish or amber like those 
of the Tevarans; he had an impression that they were gray, instead. But this was no time to find out. He 
climbed up on the sill, swung out on the gable, and left his home via the roof. 
His usual route back to the Square was blocked: the Gaal were beginning to play the rooftop game too. 
He lost all but one of his pursuers quickly enough, but that one, armed with a dart-blower, came right 
after him, leaping an eight-foot gap between two houses that had stopped the others. Agat had to drop 
down into an alley, pick himself up and run for it. 
A guard on the Esmit Street barricade, watching for just such escapes, flung down a rope ladder to him, 
and he swarmed up it. Just as he reached the top a dart stung his right hand. He came sliding down inside 
the barricade, pulled the thing out and sucked the wound and spat. The Gaal did not poison their darts or 
arrows, but they picked up and used the ones the men of Landin shot at them, and some of these, of 
course, were poisoned. It was a rather neat demonstration of one reason for the canonical Law of 
Embargo. Agat had a very bad couple of minutes waiting for the first cramp to hit him; then decided he 
was lucky, and thereupon began to feel the pain of the messy little wound in his hand. His shooting 
hand, too. 
Dinner was being dished out in the Assembly Hall, beneath the golden clocks. He had not eaten since 
daybreak. He was ravening hungry until he sat down at one of the tables with his bowl of hot bhan and 
salt meat; then he could not eat. He did not want to talk, .either, but it was better than eating, so he talked 
with everyone who gathered around him, until the alarm rang out on the bell in the tower above them: 
another attack. 

As usual, the assault moved from barricade to barricade; as usual it did not amount to much. Nobody 
could lead a 
102 
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prolonged attack in this bitter weather. What they were after in these shifting, twilight raids was the 
chance of slipping even one or two of their men over a momentarily unguarded barricade into the 
Square, to open the massive iron doors at the back of Old Hall. As darkness came, the attackers melted 
away. The archers shooting from upper win-I dows of the Old Hall and College held their fire and 
presently called down that the streets were clear. As usual, a few defenders had been hurt or killed: one 
crossbowman picked off at his window by an arrow from below, one boy who, climbing too high on the 
barricade to shoot down, had been hit in the belly with an iron-headed lance; several minor injuries. 
Every day a few more were killed or wounded and there were less to guard and fight. The subtraction of 
a few from too few . . . 
Hot and shivering again, Agat came in from this action. Most of the men who had been eating when the 
alarm came went back and finished eating. Agat had no interest in food now except to avoid the smell of 
it. His scratched hand kept bleeding afresh whenever he used it, which gave him an excuse to go down 
to the Records Room, underneath Old Hall, to have the bonesetter tie it up for him. 
It was a very large, low-ceilinged room, kept at even warmth and even soft light night and day, a good 
place to keep old instruments and charts and papers, and an equally good place to keep wounded men. 
They lay on improvised pallets on the felted floor, little islands of sleep and pain dotted about in the 
silence of the long room. Among them he saw his wife coming towards him, as he had hoped to see her. 
The sight, the real certain sight of her, did not rouse in him that bitter tenderness he felt -when he 
thought about her: instead it simply gave him intense pleasure. 
"Hullo, Rolery," he mumbled and turned away from her at once to Seiko and the bonesetter Wattock, 
asking how Hum Pilotson was. He did not know what to do with delight any more, it overcame him. 
"His wound grows," Wattock said in a whisper. Agat 
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PLANET OF EXILE 
stared at him, then realized he was speaking of Pilotson. "Grows?" he repeated uncomprehending and 
went over to kneel at Pilotson's side. 
Pilotson was looking up at him. 

"How's it going, Huru?" 
"You made a very bad mistake," the wounded man said. 
They had known each other and been friends all their lives. Agat knew at once and unmistakably what 
would be on Pilotson's mind: his marriage. But he did not know what j to answer. "It wouldn't have 
made much difference," he j began finally, then stopped; he would not justify himself. j 
Pilotson said, "There aren't enough, there aren't } enough." 
Only then did Agat realize that his friend was out of his head. "It's all right, Huru!" he said so 
authoritatively that Pilotson after a moment sighed and shut his eyes, seeming to accept this blanket 
reassurance. Agat got up and rejoined Wattock. "Look, tie this up, will you, to stop the bleeding.� 
What's wrong with Pilotson?" 
Rolery brought cloth and tape. Wattock bandaged Agat's hand with a couple of expert turns. "Alterra," 
he said, "I don't know. The Gaal must be using a poison our antidotes can't handle. I've tried 'em all. 
Pilotson Alterra isn't the only one. The wounds don't close; they swell up. Look at this boy here. It's the 
same thing." The boy, a street-guerilla of sixteen or so, was moaning and struggling like one in 
nightmare. The spear-wound in his thigh showed no bleeding, but red streaks ran from it under the skin, 
and the whole wound was strange to look at and very hot to the touch. 
"You've tried antidotes?" Agat asked, looking away from the boy's tormented face. 
"All of them. Alterra, what it reminds me of is the wound you got, early in Fall, from the klois you treed. 
Remember that? Perhaps they make some poison from the blood or glands of klois. Perhaps these 
wounds will go away as that did. Yes, that's the scar�When he was a young 
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fellow like this one," Wattock explained to Seiko and Rolery, "he went up a tree after a klois, and the 
scratches it gave him didn't seem much, but they puffed up and got hot and made him sick. But in a few 
days it all went off again." 
"This one won't get well," Rolery said very softly to Agat. 
"Why do you say that?" 
"I used to . . .to watch the medicine-woman of my clan. I learned a little . . . Those streaks, on his leg 
there, those are what they call death-paths." 

"You know this poison, then, Rolery?" 
"I don't think it's poison. Any deep wound can do it. Even a small wound that doesn't bleed, or that gets 
dirty. It's the evil of the weapon�" 
"That is superstition," the old bonesetter said fiercely. 
"We don't get the weapon-evil, Rolery," Agat told her, drawing her rather defensively away from the 
indignant old doctor. "We have an�" 
"But the boy and Pilotson Alterra do have it! Look here �" She took him over to where one of the 
wounded Tevar-ans sat, a cheerful little middle-aged fellow, who willingly showed Agat the place where 
his left ear had been before an ax took it off. The wound was healing, but was puffed, hot, oozing . . . 
Unconsciously Agat put his hand up to his own throbbing, untended scalp-wound. 
Wattock had followed them. Glaring at the unoffending hilf, he said, "What the local hilfs call 'weaponevil' 
is, of course, bacterial infection. You studied it in school, Alterra. As human beings are not 
susceptible to infection by any local bacterial or viral life-forms, the only harm we can suffer is damage 
to vital organs, exsanguination, or chemical poisoning, for which we have antidotes�" 
"But the boy is dying, Elder," said Rolery in her soft, unyielding voice. "The wound was not washed out 
before it was sewed together�" 
The old doctor went rigid with fury. "Get back among 
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PLANET OF EXILE 
your own kind and don't tell me how to care for humans�" 
"That's enough," Agat said. 
Silence. 
"Rolery," Agat said, "if you can be spared here a while, I thought we might go . . ." He had been about to 
say, "go home." "To get some dinner, maybe," he finished vaguely. 
She had not eaten; he sat with her in the Assembly Room, and ate a little. Then they put on their coats to 
cross the unlit, wind-whistling Square to the College building, where they shared a classroom with two 

other couples. The dormitories in Old Hall were more comfortable, but most of the married couples of 
which the wife had not gone out to the Stack preferred at least this semi-privacy, when they could have 
it. One woman was sound asleep behind a row of desks, bundled up in her coat. Tables had been upended 
to seal the broken windows from stones and darts and wind. Agat and his wife put their coats 
down on the unmatted floor for bedding. Before she let him sleep, Rolery gathered clean snow from a 
windowsill and washed the wounds in his hand and scalp with it. It hurt, and he protested, shorttempered 
with fatigue; but she said, "You are the Alterra�you don't get sick�but this will do no harm. 
No harm . . ." 
106 
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Lost Day 
IN HIS FEVERISH sleep, in the cold darkness of the dusty room, Agat spoke aloud sometimes, and 
once when she was asleep he called to her from his own sleep, reaching out across the unlit abyss, 
calling her name from farther and farther away. His voice broke her dreaming and she woke. It was still 
dark. 
Morning came early: light shone in around the upturned tables, white streaks across the ceiling. The 
woman who had been there when they came in last night still slept on in exhaustion, but the other 
couple, who had slept on one of the writing-tables to avoid the drafts, roused up. Agat sat up, looked 
around, and said in his hoarse voice, with a stricken look, "The storm's over . . ." Sliding one of the 
tables aside a little they peered out and saw the world again: the trampled Square, snow-mounded 
barricades, great shuttered facades of the four buildings, snow-covered roofs beyond them, and a 
glimpse of the sea. A white and blue world, brilliantly clear, the shadows blue and every point touched 
by the early sunlight dazzling white. 
It was very beautiful; but it was as if the walls that protected them had been torn down in the night. 
Agat was thinking what she thought, for he said, "We'd better get on over to the Hall before they realize 
they can sit up on the rooftops and use us for target-practice." 
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PLANET OF EXILE 
"We can use the basement tunnels to get from one building to another," one of the others said. Agat 
nodded. "We will," he said. "But the barricades have got to be manned 
�
� � . 

Rolery procrastinated till the others had gone, then managed to persuade the impatient Agat to let her 
look at his head-wound again. It was improved or at least no worse. His face still showed the beating he 
had got from her kinsmen; her own hands were bruised from handling rocks and ropes, and full of sores 
that the cold had made worse. She rested her battered hands on his battered head and began to laugh. 
"Like two old warriors," she said. "O Jakob Agat, when we go to the country under the sea, will you 
have your front teeth back?" 
He looked up at her, not understanding, and tried to smile, but failed. 
"Maybe when a f arborn dies he goes back to the stars� to the other worlds," she said, and ceased to 
smile. 
"No," he said, getting up. "No, we stay right here. Come along, my wife." 
For all the brilliant light from the sun and sky and snow, the air outside was so cold it hurt to breathe. 
They were hurrying across the square to the arcades of the League Hall when a noise behind them made 
them turn, Agat with his dartgun drawn, both ready to duck and run. A strange shrieking figure seemed 
to fly up over the barricade and crashed down headfirst inside it, not twenty feet from them: a Gaal, two 
lances bristling out between his ribs. Guards on the barricades stared and shouted, archers loaded their 
crossbows in haste, glancing up at a man who was yelling down at them from a shuttered window on the 
east side of the building above them. The dead Gaal lay face down in the bloody, trampled snow, in the 
blue shadow of the barricade. 
One of the guards came running up to Agat, shouting "Alterra, it must be the signal for an attack�" 
Another man, bursting out of the door of the College, interrupted 
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PLANET OF EXILE 
him, "No, I saw it, it was chasing him, that's why he was yelling like that�" 
"Saw what? Did he attack like that all by himself?" 
"He was running from it�trying to save his life! Didn't you see it, you on the barricade? No wonder he 
was yelling. White, runs like a man, with a neck like�God, like this, Alterra! It came around the corner 
after him, and then turned back." 
"A snowghoul," Agat said, and turned for confirmation to Rolery. She had heard Wold's tales, and 
nodded. "White, and tall, and the head going from side to side . . ." She imitated Wold's grisly imitation, 
and the man who had seen the thing from the window cried, "That's it." Agat mounted the barricade to 
try and get a sight of the monster. She stayed below, looking down at the dead man, who had been so 
terrified that he had run on his enemy's lances to escape. She had not seen a Gaal up close, for no 

prisoners were taken, and her work had been underground with the wounded. The body was short and 
thin, rubbed with grease till the skin, whiter than her own, shone like fat meat; the greased hair was 
interbraided with red feathers. Ill-clothed, with a felt rag for a coat, the dead man lay sprawled in his 
abrupt death, face buried as if still hiding from the white beast that had hunted him. The girl stood 
motionless near him in the bright, icy shadow of the barricade. 
"There!" she heard Agat shout, above her on the slanting, stepped inner face of the wall, built of pavingstones 
and rocks from the seacliffs. He came down to her, his eyes blazing, and hurried her off to the 
League Hall. "Saw it just for a second as it crossed Otake Street. It was running, it swung its head 
towards us. Do the things hunt in packs?" 
She did not know; she only knew Wold's story of having killed a snowhoul single-handed, among last 
Winter's mythic snows. They brought the news and the question into the crowded refectory. Umaksuman 
said positively that snowghouls often ran in packs, but the farborns would not take a hilf's word, and had 
to go look in their books. The 
109 
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PLANET OF EXILE 
book they brought in said that snowghouls had been seen after the first storm of the Ninth Winter 
running in a pack of twelve to fifteen. 
"How do the books say? They make no sound. It is like the mindspeech you speak to me?" 
Agat looked at her. They were at one of the long tables in the Assembly Room, drinking the hot, thin 
grass-soup the farborns liked; ti, they called it. 
"No�well, yes, a little. Listen, Rolery, I'll be going outside in a minute. You go back to the hospital. 
Don't mind Wattock's temper. He's an old man and he's tired. He knows a lot, though. Don't cross the 
Square if you have to go to another building, use the tunnels. Between the Gall archers and those 
creatures . . ." He gave a kind of laugh. "What next, I wonder?" he said. 
"Jakob Agat, I wanted to ask you . . ." 
In the short time she had known him, she had never learned for certain how many pieces his name came 
into, and which pieces she should use. 
"I listen," he said gravely. 
"Why is it that you don't speak mindspeech to the Gaal? Tell them to�to go. As you told me on the 

beach to run to the Stack. As your herdsman told the hann . . ." 
"Men aren't hann," he said; and it occurred to her that he was the only one of them all that spoke of her 
people and his own and the Gaal all as men. 
"The old one�Pasfal�she listened to the Gaal, when the big army was starting on south." 
"Yes. People with the gift and the training can listen in, even at a distance, without the other mind's 
knowing it. That's a bit like what any person does in a crowd of people, he feels their fear or joy; there's 
more to mindhearing than that, but it's without words. But the mindspeech, and receiving mindspeech, is 
different. An untrained man, if you bespeak him, will shut his mind to it before he knows he's heard 
anything. Especially if what he hears isn't what he himself wants or believes. Non-Communicants have 
perrio 
PLANET OF EXILE 
feet defenses, usually. In fact to learn paraverbal communication is mainly to learn how to break down 
one's own defenses." 
"But the animals hear?" 
"To some extent. That's done without words again. Some people have that knack for projecting to 
animals. It's useful hi herding and hunting, all right. Did you never hear that farborns were lucky 
hunters?" 
"Yes, it's why they're called witches. But am I like a hann, then? I heard you." 
"Yes. And you bespoke me�once, in my house�It happens sometimes between two people: there are 
no barriers, no defenses." He drained his cup and looked up broodingly at the pattern of sun and jeweled 
circling worlds on the long wall across the room. "When that happens," he said, "it's necessary that they 
love each other. Necessary ... I can't send my fear or hate against the Gaal. They wouldn't hear. But if I 
turned it on you, I could kill you. And you me, Rolery . . ." 
Then they came wanting him out in the square, and he must leave her. She went down to look after the 
Tevaran men in the hospital, which was her assigned job, and also to help the wounded farborn boy to 
die: a hard death that took all day. The old bonesetter let her take care of the boy. Wattock was bitter and 
rageful, seeing all his skill useless. "We humans don't die your foul death!" he stormed once. "The boy 
was born with some blood defect!" She did not care what he said. Neither did the boy, who died in pain, 
holding onto her hand. 
New wounded were brought down into the big, quiet room, one or two at a time. Only by this did they 

know that there must be bitter fighting, up in the sunlight on the snow. Umaksuman was carried down, 
knocked unconscious by a Gaal slingshot. Great-limbed and stately he lay, and she looked at him with a 
dull pride: a warrior, a brother. She thought him near death, but after a while he sat up, shaking his head, 
and then stood up. "What place is this?" 
Ill 
PLANET OF EXILE 
he demanded, and she almost laughed when she answered. Wold's kin were hard to kill off. He told her 
that the Gaal were running an attack against all the barricades at once, a ceaseless push, like the great 
attack on the Land Gate when the whole force of them had tried to scale the walls on one another's 
shoulders. "They are stupid warriors," he said, rubbing the great lump over his ear. "If they sat up on the 
roofs around this Square for a week and shot at us with arrows, we wouldn't have men enough left to 
hold the barricades. All they know is to come running all at once, yelling . . ." He rubbed his head again, 
said, "What did they do with my spear?" and went back up to the fighting. 
The dead were not brought down here, but laid in an open shed in the Square till they could be burned. If 
Agat had been killed, she would not know it. When bearers came with a new patient she looked up with 
a surge of hope: if it were Agat wounded, then he was not dead. But it was never him. She wondered if, 
when he was killed, he would cry out to her mind before he died; and if that cry would kiU her. 
Late in the unending day the old woman Alia Pasfal was carried down. With certain other old men and 
women of the farborns, she had demanded the dangerous job of bringing arms to the defenders of the 
barricades, which meant running across the Square with no shelter from the enemy's fire. A Gaal lance 
had pierced her throat from side to side. Wattock could do very little for her. A little, black, old woman, 
she lay dying among the young men. Caught by her gaze, Rolery went to her, a basin of bloody vomit in 
her hands. Hard, dark, and depthless as rock the old eyes gazed at her; and Rolery looked straight back, 
though it was not a thing her people did. 
The bandaged throat rattled, the mouth twisted. 
To break down one's own defenses ... 
"I listen!" Rolery said aloud, in the formal phrase of her people, in a shaking voice. 
112 
PLANET OF EXILE 
They will go, Alia Pasfal's voice, tired and faint, said in her mind: They'll try to follow the others south. 
They fear us, the snowghouls, the houses and streets. They are afraid, they will go after this attack. Tell 
Jakob I can hear, I can hear them. Tell Jakob they will go�tomorrow� 

"I'll tell him," Rolery said, and broke into tears. Moveless, speechless, the dying woman stared at her 
with eyes like dark stones. 
Rolery went back to her job, for the hurt men needed attention and Wattock had no other assistant. And 
what good would it do to go seek out Agat up there in the bloody snow and the noise and haste, to tell 
him, before he was killed, that a mad old woman dying had said they would survive? 
She went on about her work with tears still running down her face. One of the farborns, badly wounded 
but eased by the wonderful medicine Wattock used, a little ball that, swallowed, made pain lessen or 
cease, asked her, "Why are you crying?" He asked it drowsily, curiosly, as one child might ask another. 
"I don't know," Rolery told him. "Go to sleep." But she did know, though vaguely, that she was crying 
because hope was intolerably painful, breaking through into the resignation hi which she had lived for 
days; and pain, since she was only a woman, made her weep. 
There was no way at all of knowing it down here, but the day must be ending, for Seiko Esmit came 
with hot food on a tray for her and Wattock and those of the wounded that could eat. She waited to take 
the bowls back, and Rolery said to her, "The old one, Pasfal Alterra, is dead." 
Seiko only nodded. Her face was tight and strange. She said in a high voice, "They're shooting 
firebrands now, and throwing burning stuff down from the roofs. They can't break in so they're going to 
burn the buildings and the stores and then we all can starve together in the cold. If the Hall catches fire 
you'll be trapped down here. Burnt alive." 
Rolery ate her food and said nothing. The hot bhan-meal 
113 
PLANET OF EXILE 
had been flavored with meat juice and chopped herbs. The farborns under siege were better cooks than 
her people in the midst of Autumn plenty. She finished up her bowl, and also the half-bowlful a 
wounded man left, and another scrap or two, and brought the tray back to Seiko, only wishing there had 
been more. 
No one else came down for a long time. The men slept, and moaned in their sleep. It was warm; the heat 
of the gas-fires rose up through the gratings making it comfortable as a fire-warmed tent. Through the 
breathing of the men sometimes Rolery could hear the tick, tick, tick of the round-faced things on the 
walls, and they, and the glass cases pushed back against the wall, and the high rows of books, winked in 
gold and brown glimmerings in the soft, steady light of the gas-flares. 
"Did you give him the analgesic?" Wattock whispered, and she shrugged yes, rising from beside one of 
the men. The old bonesetter looked half a Year older than he was, as he squatted down beside Rolery at 

a study table to cut bandages, of which they had run short. He was a very great doctor, hi Rolery's eyes. 
To please him in his fatigue and discouragement she asked him, "Elder, if it's not the weapon-evil that 
makes a wound rot, what thing does?" 
"Oh�creatures. Little beasts, too small to see. I could only show 'em to you with a special glass, like 
that one in the case over there. They live nearly everywhere; they're on the weapon, in the air, on the 
skin. If they get into the blood, the body resists 'em and the battle is what causes the swelling and all 
that. So the books say. It's nothing that ever concerned me as a doctor." 
"Why don't the creatures bite farborns?" 
"Because they don't like foreigners." Wattock snorted at his small joke. "We are foreign, you know. We 
can't even digest food here unless we take periodic doses of certain enzymoids. We have a chemical 
structure that's very slightly different from the local organic norm, and it shows up 
114 
PLANET OF EXILE 
in the cytoplasm�You don't know what that is. Well, what it means is, we're made of slightly different 
stuff that you hilfs are." 
"So that you're dark-skinned and we light?" "No, that's unimportant. Totally superficial variations, color 
and eye-structure and all that. No, the difference is on a lower level, and is very small�one molecule in 
the hereditary chain," Wattock said with relish, warming to his lecture. "It causes no major divergence 
from the Common Hominid Type in you hilfs; so the first colonists wrote, and they knew. But it means 
that we can't interbreed with you; or digest local organic food without help; or react to your viruses. . . . 
Though as a matter of fact, this enzymoid business is a bit overdone. Part of the effort to do exactly as 
the First Generation did. Pure superstition, some of that. I've seen people come hi from long huntingtrips, 
or the Atlantika refugees last Spring, who hadn't taken an enzy^ moid shot or pill for two or three 
moonphases, but weren't failing to digest. Life tends to adapt, after all." As he said this Wattock got a 
very odd expression, and stared at her. She felt guilty, since she had no idea what he had been explaining 
to her: none of the key words were words in her language. "Life what?" she inquired timidly. 
"Adapts. Reacts. Changes! Given enough pressure, and enough generations, the favorable adaptation 
tends to prevail. . . . Would the solar radiation work in the long run towards a sort of local biochemical 
norm . . . all the stillbirths and miscarriages then would be overadaptations or maybe incompatibility 
between the mother and a normalized fetus . . ." Wattock stopped waving his scissors and bent to his 
work again, but in a moment he was looking up again in his unseeing, intense way and muttering, 
"Strange, strange, strange! . . . That would imply, you know, that cross-fertilization might take place." 
"I listen again," Rollery murmured. 

"That men and hilfs could breed together!" 
115 
PLANET OF EXILE 
This she understood at last, but did not understand whether he said it as a fact or a wish or a dread. 
"Elder, I am too stupid to hear you," she said. 
"You understand him well enough," said a weak voice nearby: Pilotson Alterra, lying awake. "So you 
think we've finally turned into a drop in the bucket, Wattock?" Pilotson had raised up on his elbow. His 
dark eyes glittered in his gaunt, hot, dark face. 
"If you and several of the others do have infected wounds, then the fact's got to be explained somehow." 
"Damn adaptation then. Damn your crossbreeding and fertility!" the sick man said, and looked at Rolery. 
"So long as we've bred true we've been Man. Exiles, Alterrans, humans. Faithful to the knowledge and 
the Laws of Man. Now, if we can breed with the hilfs, the drop of our human blood will be lost before 
another Year's past. Diluted, thinned out to nothing. Nobody will set these instruments, or read these 
books. Jakob Agat's grandsons will sit pounding two rocks together and yelling, till the end of time . . . 
Damn you stupid barbarians, can't you leave men alone� alone!" He was shaking with fever and fury. 
Old Wattock, who had been fiddling with one of his little hollow darts, filling it up, now reached over in 
his smooth doctorly way and shot poor Pilotson in the forearm. "Lie down, Huru," he said, and with a 
puzzled expression the wounded man obeyed. "I don't care if I die of your filthy infections," he said in a 
thickening voice, "but your filthy brats, keep them away from here, keep 'em out of the . . . out of the 
City . . ." 
"That'll hold him down a while," Wattock said, and sighed. He sat hi silence while Rolery went on 
preparing bandages. She was deft and steady at such work. The old doctor watched her with a brooding 
face. 
When she straightened up to ease her back she saw the old man too had fallen asleep, a dark pile of skin 
and bones hunched up in the corner behind the table. She worked on, 
116 
PLANET OF EXILE 
wondering if she had understood what he said, and if he had meant it: that she could bear Agat's son. 
She had totally forgotten that Agat might very well be dead already, for all she knew. She sat there 
among the sleep of wounded men, under the ruined city full of death, and brooded speechlessly on the 
chance of life. 

117 
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The First Day 
THE COLD gripped harder as night fell. Snow that had thawed in sunlight froze as slick ice. Concealed 
on nearby roofs or in attics, the Gaal shot over their pitch-tipped arrows that arched red and gold like 
birds of fire through the cold twilit air. The roofs of the four beleaguered buildings were of copper, the 
walls of stone; no fire caught. The attacks on the barricades ceased, no more arrows of iron or fire were 
shot. Standing up on the barricade, Jakob Agat saw the darkening streets slant off empty between dark 
houses. 
At first the men in the Square waited for a night attack, for the Gaal were plainly desperate; but it grew 
colder, and still colder. At last Agat ordered that only the minimum watch be kept, and let most of the 
men go to get their wounds looked after, and get food and rest. If they were exhausted, so must the Gaal 
be, and they at least were clothed against this cold while the Gaal were not. Even desperation would not 
drive the northerners out into this awful, starlit clarity, in their scant rags of fur and felt. So the defenders 
slept, many at their posts, huddled hi the halls and by the windows of warm buildings. And the 
besiegers, without food, pressed around campfires built in high stone rooms; and their dead lay stifflimbed 
hi the ice-crusted snow below the barricades. 
118 
PLANET OF EXILE 
Agat wanted no sleep. He could not go inside the buildings, leaving the Square where all day long they 
had fought for their lives, and which now lay so still under the Winter constellations. The Tree; and the 
Arrow; and the Track of five stars; and the Snowstar itself, fiery above the eastern roofs: the stars of 
Whiter. They burned like crystals hi the profound, cold blackness overhead. 
He knew this was the last night�his own last night, or his city's, or the last night of battle�which one, 
he did not know. As the hours wore on, and the Snowstar rose higher, and utter silence held the Square 
and the streets around it, a kind of exultation got hold of him. They slept, all the enemies within these 
city walls, and it was as if he alone waked; as if the city belonged, with all its sleepers and all its dead, to 
him alone. This was his night. 
He would not spend it locked hi a trap within a trap. With a word to the sleepy guard, he mounted the 
Esmit Street barricade and swung himself down on the other side. "Alterra!" someone called after him hi 
a hoarse whisper; he only turned and gestured that they keep a rope ready for him to get back up on, and 
went on, right up the middle of the street. He had a conviction of his invulnerability with which it would 
be bad luck to argue. He accepted it, and walked up the dark street among his enemies as if he were 
taking a stroll after dinner. 

He passed his house but did not turn aside. Stars eclipsed behind the black roof-peaks and reappeared, 
their reflections glittering in the ice underfoot. Near the upper end of town the street narrowed and 
turned a little between houses that had been deserted since before Agat was born, and then opened out 
suddenly into the little square under the Land Gate. The catapults still stood there, partly wrecked and 
dismantled for firewood by the Gaal, each with a heap of stones beside it. The high gates themselves had 
been opened at one point, but were bolted again now and frozen fast. Agat climbed up the steps beside 
one of the gate-towers to a post on the wall; he remembered looking 
119 
PLANET OF EXILE 
down from that post, just before the snow began, on the whole battle-force of the Gaal, a roaring tide of 
men like the seatide down on the beach. If they had had more ladders it would have all been over with 
that day . . . Now nothing moved; nothing made any sound. Snow, silence, starlight over the slope and 
the dead, ice-laden trees that crowned it. 
He looked back westward, over the whole City of Exile; a little clutter of roofs dropping down away 
from his high post to the wall over the seacliff. Above that handful of stone the stars moved slowly 
westward. Agat sat motionless, cold even in his clothing of leather and heavy furs, whistling a jig-tune 
very softly. 
Finally he felt the day's weariness catching up with him, and descended from his perch. The steps were 
icy. He slipped on the next to bottom step, caught himself from falling by grabbing the rough stone of 
the wall, and then still staggering looked up at some movement that had caught his eyes across the little 
square. 
In the black gulf of a street opening between two house-walls, something white moved, a slight swaying 
motion like a wave seen in the dark. Agat stared, puzzled. Then it came out into the vague gray of the 
starlight: a tall, thin, white figure running towards him very quickly as a man runs, the head on the long, 
curving neck swaying a little from side to side. As it came it made a little wheezing, chirping sound. 
His dartgun had been in his hand all along, but his hand was stiff from yesterday's wound, and the glove 
hampered him: he shot and the dart struck, but the creature was already on him, the short clawed 
forearms reaching out, the head stuck forward with its weaving, swaying motion, a round toothed mouth 
gaping open. He threw himself down right against its legs in an effort to trip it and escape the first lunge 
of that snapping mouth, but it was quicker than he. Even as he went down it turned and caught at him, 
and he felt the claws on the weak-looking little arms tear through the leather of his coat and clothing, 
and felt him- 
120 
PLANET OF EXILE 

self pinned down. A terrible strength bent his head back> baring his throat; and he saw the stars whirl hi 
the sky far up above him, and go out. 
And then he was trying to pull himself up on hands and knees, on the icy stones beside a great, reeking 
bulk of white fur that twitched and trembled. Five seconds it took the poison on the darttip to act; it had 
almost been a second too long. The round mouth still snapped open and shut, the legs with thek flat, 
splayed, snowshoe feet pumped as if the snowghoul were still running. Snowghouls hunt in packs, 
Agat's memory said suddenly, as he stood trying to get his breath and nerve back. Snowghouls hunt in 
packs . . . He reloaded his gun clumsily but methodically, and, with it held ready, started back down 
Esmit Street; not running lest he slip on the ice, but not strolling, either. The street was still empty, and 
serene, and very long. 
But as he neared the barricade, he was whistling again. 
He was sound asleep in the room in the College when young Shevik, their best archer, came to rouse 
him up, whispering urgently, "Come on, Alterra, come on, wake up, you've got to come . . ." Rolery had 
not come in during the night; the others who shared the room were all still asleep. 
"What is it, what's wrong?" Agat mumbled, on his feet and struggling into his torn coat already. 
"Come on to the Tower," was all Shevik said. 
Agat followed him, at first with docility, then, waking up fully, with beginning understanding. They 
crossed the Square, gray in the first bleak light, ran up the circular stairs of the League Tower, and 
looked out over the city. The Land Gate was open. 
The Gaal were gathered inside it, and going out of it. It was hard to see them in the half-light before 
sunrise; there were between a thousand and two thousand of them, the men watching with Agat guessed, 
but it was hard to tell. They were only shadowy blots of motion under the walls and on the snow. They 
strung out from the Gate in knots 
121 
PLANET OF EXILE 
and groups, one after another disappearing under the walls and then reappearing farther away on the 
hillside, going at a jogtrot in a long irregular line, going south. Before they had gone far the dim light 
and the folds of the hill hid them; but before Agat stopped watching the east had grown bright, and a 
cold radiance reached halfway up the sky. 
The houses and the steep streets of the city lay very quiet in the morning light. 

Somebody began to ring the bell, right over their heads in the tower there, a steady rapid clamor and 
clangor of bronze on bronze, bewildering. Hands over their ears, the men in the tower came running 
down, meeting other men and women halfway. They laughe'd and they shouted after Agat and caught at 
him, but he ran on down the rocking stairs, the insistent jubilation of the bell still hammering at him, and 
into the League Hall. In the big, crowded, noisy room where golden suns swam on the walls and the 
years and Years were told on golden dials, he searched for the alien, the stranger" his wife. He finally 
found her, and taking her hands he said, "They're gone, they're gone, they're gone ..." 
Then he turned and roared it with all the force of his lungs at everybody�"They're gone!" 
They were all roaring at him and at one another, laughing and crying. After a minute he said to Rolery, 
"Come on with me�out to the Stack." Restless, exultant, bewildered, he wanted to be on the move, to 
get out into the city and make sure it was their own again. No one else had left the Square yet, and as 
they crossed the west barricade Agat drew his dartgun. "I had an adventure last night," he said to Rolery, 
and she, looking at the gaping rent in his coat, said, "I know." 
"I killed it." 
"A snowghoul?" 
"Right." 
122 
PLANET OF EXILE 
"Alone?" 
"Yes. Both of us, fortunately." 
The solemn look on her face as she hurried along beside him made him laugh out loud with pleasure. 
They came out onto the causeway, running out in the. icy wind between the bright sky and the dark, 
foam-laced water. 
The news of course had already been given, by the bell and by mindspeech, and the drawbridge of the 
Stack was lowered as soon as Agat set foot on the bridge. Men and women and little sleepy, fur-bundled 
children came running to meet them, with more shouts, questions, and embraces. 
Behind the women of Landin, the women of Tevar hung back, afraid and unrejoicing. Agat saw Rolery 
going to one of these, a young woman with wild hair and dirt-smudged face. Most of them had hacked 
their hair short and looked unkempt and filthy, even the few hilf men who had stayed out at the Stack. A 
little disgusted by this grimy spot on his bright morning of victory, Agat spoke to Umaksuman, who had 

come out to gather his tribesmen together. They stood on the drawbridge, under the sheer wall of the 
black fort. Hilf men and women had collected around Umaksuman, and Agat lifted up his voice so they 
all could hear. "The Men of Tevar kept our walls side by side with the Men of Landin. They are 
welcome to stay with us or to go, to live with us or leave us, as they please. The gates of my city are 
open to you, all Winter long. You are free to go out them, but welcome within them!" 
"I hear," the native said, bowing his fair head. 
"But where's the Eldest, Wold? I wanted to tell him�" 
Then Agat saw the ash-smeared faces and ragged heads with a new eye. They were in mourning. In 
understanding that he remembered his own dead, his friends, his kinsmen; and the arrogance of triumph 
went out of him. 
Umaksuman said, "The Eldest of my Kin went under 
123 
PLANET OF EXILE 
the sea with his sons who died in Tevar. Yesterday he went. They were building the dawn-fire when 
they heard the bell and saw the Gaal going south." 
"I would watch this fire," Agat said, asking Umaksu-man's permission. The Tevaran hesitated, but an 
older man beside him said firmly, "Wold's daughter is this one's wife: he has clan right." 
So they let him come, with Rolery and all that were left of her people, to a high terrace outside a gallery 
on the seaward side of the Stack. There on a pyre of broken wood the body of the old man lay, agedeformed 
and powerful, wrapped hi a red cloth, death's color. A young child set the torch and the fire 
burnt red and yellow, shaking the air, paled by the cold early light of the sun. The tide was drawing out, 
grinding and thundering at the rocks below the sheer black walls. East over the hills of Askatevar Range 
and west over the sea the sky was clear, but northward a bluish dusk brooded: Whiter. 
Five thousand nights of Winter, five thousand days of it: the rest of their youth and maybe the rest of 
their lives. 
Against that distant, bluish darkness in the north, no triumph showed up at all. The Gaal seemed a little 
scurry of vermin, gone already, fleeing before the true enemy, the true lord, the white lord of the Storms. 
Agat stood by Rolery in front of the sinking death-fire, in the high sea-beleaguered fort, and it seemed to 
him then that the old man's death and the young man's victory were the same thing. Neither grief nor 
pride had so much truth in them as did joy, the joy that trembled in the cold wind between sky and sea, 
bright and brief as fire. This was his fort, his city, his world; these were his people. He was no exile here. 

"Come," he said to Rolery as the fire sank down to ashes, "come, let's go home." 
124 
ANDRE NORTON 
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25C 
The Earth colony had been stranded on distant Eltanin for six hundred years. And its lonely, strained 
numbers were beginning to dwindle, their only neighbors fearful nomads who burrowed in beside them 
during the cruel, fifteen-year-long winter ... 
Fortunately for all. Because this winter they would be descended upon by hordes of barbarians and the 
eerie, deadly snowghouls. 
And native and exile would have to join forces �or be annihilated. 

URSULA K. Le GUIN 
OLDERS 
The moon slips and shines in the wrinkled mirror before the prow, and from the 
northern sky the Bright Companions shoot glancing arrows of light along the 
water. In the stern of the boat the polesman stands in the watchful solemnity of 
his task. His movements as he poles and steers the boat are slow, certain, 
august. The long, low channelboat slides on the black water as silently as the 
reflection it pursues. A few dark figures huddle in it. One dark figure lies 
full length on the half deck, arms at his sides, closed eyes unseeing that other 
moon slipping and shining through wisps of fog in the luminous blue night sky. 
The Husbandman of Sandry is coming home from war. 
They had been waiting for him on Sandry Island ever since last spring, when he 
went with seven men, following the messengers who came to raise the Queen's 
army. In midsummer Four of the men of Sandry brought back the news that he was 
wounded and was lying in the care of the Queen's own physician. They told of his 
great valor in battle, and told of their own prowess too, and how they had won 
the war. Since then there had been no news. 
With him now in the channelboat were the three companions who had stayed with 
him, and a physician sent by the Queen, an, assistant to her own doctor. This 
man, an active, slender person in his forties, cramped by the long night's 
travel, was quick to leap ashore when the boat slid silently up along the stone 
quay of Sandry Farm. 
While the boatmen and the others busied themselves making the boat fast and 
lifting the stretcher and its burden up from the boat to the quay, the doctor 
went on up to the house. Approaching the island, as the sky imperceptibly 
lightened from night-blue to colorless pallor, he had seen the spires of 
windmills, the crowns of trees, and the roofs of the house, all in black 
silhouette, standing very high after the miles of endlessly level reedbeds and 
water channels. "Hello, the people!" he called out as he entered the courtyard. 
"Wake up! Sandry has come home!" 
The kitchen was astir already. Lights sprang up elsewhere in the big house. The 
doctor heard voices, doors. A stableboy came vaulting out of the loft where he 
had slept, a dog barked and barked its tardy warning, people began to come out 
of the house door. As the stretcher was borne into the courtyard, the Farmwife 
came hurrying out, wrapped in a green cloak that hid her night dress, her hair 

loose, her feet bare on the stones. She ran to the stretcher as they set it 
down. "Farre, Farre," she said, kneeling, bending over the still figure. No one 
spoke or moved in that moment. "He is dead," she said in a whisper, drawing 
back. 
"He is alive," the doctor said. And the oldest of the litterbearers, Pask the 
saddler, said in his rumbling bass, "He lives, Makalidem. But the wound was 
deep." 
The doctor looked with pity and respect at the Farmwife, at her bare feet and 
her clear, bewildered eyes. "Dema," he said, "let us bring him in to the 
warmth." 
"Yes, yes," she said, rising and running ahead to prepare. 
When the stretcher bearers came out again, half the people of Sandry were in the 
courtyard waiting to hear their news. Most of all they looked to old Pask when 
he came out, and he looked at them all. He was a big, slow man, girthed like an 
oak, with a stiff face set in deep lines. "Will he live?" a woman ventured. Pask 
continued looking them all over until he chose to speak. "We'll plant him," he 
said. 
"Ah, ah!" the woman cried, and a groan and sigh went among them all. 
"And our grandchildren's children will know his name," said Dyadi, Pask's wife, 
bossoming through the crowd to her husband. "Hello, old man." 
"Hello, old woman," Pask said. They eyed each other from an equal height. 
"Still walking, are you?" she said. 
"How else get back where I belong?" Pask said. His mouth was too set in a 
straight line to smile, but his eyes glinted a little. 
"Took your time doing it. Come on, old man. You must be perishing." They strode 
off side by side toward the lane that led to the saddlery and paddocks. The 
courtyard buzzed on, all in low-voiced groups around the other two returned men, 
getting and giving the news of the wars, the city, the marsh isles, the farm. 
Indoors, in the beautiful high shadowy room where Farre now lay in the bed still 
warm from his wife's sleep, the physician stood by the bedside, as grave, 
intent, careful as the polesman had stood in the stern of the channelboat. He 
watched the wounded man, his fingers on the pulse. The room was perfectly still. 

The woman stood at the foot of the bed, and presently he turned to her and gave 
a quiet nod that said, Very well, as well as can be expected. 
"He seems scarcely to breathe," she whispered. Her eyes looked large in her face 
knotted and clenched with anxiety. "He's breathing," the escort assured her. 
"Slow and deep. Dema, my name is Hamid, assistant to the Queen's physician, Dr. 
Saker. Her majesty and the Doctor, who had your husband in his care, desired me 
to come with him and stay here as long as I am needed, to give what care I can. 
Her majesty charged me to tell you that she is grateful for his sacrifice, that 
she honors his courage in her service. She will do what may be done to prove 
that gratitude and to show that honor. And still she bade me tell you that 
whatever may be done will fall short of his due." 
"Thank you," said the Farmwife, perhaps only partly understanding, gazing only 
at the set, still face on the pillow. She was trembling a little. 
"You're cold, dema," Hamid said gently and respectfully. "You should get 
dressed." 
"Is he warm enough? Was he chilled, in the boat? I can have the fire laid--" 
"No. He's warm enough. It's you I speak of, dema." 
She glanced at him a little wildly, as if seeing him that moment. "Yes," she 
said. "Thank you." 
"I'll come back in a little while," he said, laid his hand on his heart, and 
quietly went out, closing the massive door behind him. 
He went across to the kitchen wing and demanded food and drink for a starving 
man, a thirsty man leg-cramped from crouching in a damned boat all night. He was 
not shy, and was used to the authority of his calling. It had been a long 
journey overland from the city, and then poling through the marshes, with Broad 
Isle the only hospitable place to stop among the endless channels, and the sun 
beating down all day, and then the long dreamlike discomfort of the night. He 
made much of his hunger and travail to amuse his hosts and to divert them, too, 
from asking questions about how the Husbandman did and would do. He did not want 
to tell them 'more than the man's wife knew. 
But they, discreet or knowing or respectful, asked no direct questions of him. 
Though their concern for Farre was plain, they asked only, by various 
indirections, if he was sure to live, and seemed satisfied by that assurance. In 

some faces Hamid thought he saw a glimpse of something beyond satisfaction: a 
brooding acceptance in one; an almost conniving intelligence in another. One 
young fellow blurted out, "Then will he be--" and shut his mouth, under the 
joined stares of five or six older people. They were a trapmouthed lot, the 
Sandry Islanders. All that were not actively young looked old: seamed,weather 
beaten, brown skin wrinkled and silvery, hands gnarled, hair thick, coarse, and 
dry. Only their eyes were quick, observant. And some of them had eyes of an 
unusual color, like amber; Pask, his wife Dyadi, and several others, as well as 
Farre himself. The first time Hamid had seen Farre, before the coma deepened, he 
had been struck by the strong features and those light, clear eyes. They all 
spoke a strong dialect, but Hamid had grown up not far inland from the marshes, 
and anyhow had an ear for dialects. By the end of his large and satisfying 
breakfast he was glottal-stopping with the best of them. 
He returned to the great bedroom with a well-loaded tray. As he bad expected, 
the Farmwife, dressed and shod, was sitting close beside the bed, her hand lying 
lightly on her husband's hand. She looked up at Hamid politely but as an 
intruder: please be quiet, don't interrupt us, make him be well and go away. . . 
. Hamid had no particular eye for beauty in women, perhaps having seen beauty 
too often at too short a distance, where it dissolves; but he responded to a 
woman's health, to the firm sweet flesh, the quiver and vigor of full life. And 
she was fully alive. She was as tender and powerful as a red-deer doe, as 
unconsciously splendid. He wondered if there were fawns, and then saw the child 
standing behind her chair. The room, its shutters closed, was all shadow with a 
spatter and dappling of broken light across the islands of heavy furniture, the 
footboard of the bed, the folds of the coverlet, the child's face and dark eyes. 
"Hamiddem," the Farmwife said--despite her absorption in her husband she had 
caught his name, then, with the desperate keen hearing of the sickroom, where 
every word carries hope or doom--"I still cannot see him breathe." 
"Lay your ear against his chest," he said, in a tone deliberately louder than 
her whisper. "You'll hear the heart beat, and feel the lungs expand. Though 
slowly, as I said. Dema, I brought this for you. Now you'll sit here, see, at 
this table. A little more light, a shutter open, so. It won't disturb him, not 
at all. Light is good. You are to sit here and eat breakfast. Along with your 
daughter, who must be hungry, too." 
She introduced the child, Idi, a girl of five or six, who clapped her hand on 
her heart and whispered "Give-you-good-day-dema" all in one glottal-stopped word 
before she shrank back behind her mother: 
It is pleasant to be a physician and be obeyed, Hamid reflected, as the 

Farm-wife and her child, large and little images of each other in their shirts 
and full trousers and silken braided hair, sat at the table where he had put the 
tray down and meekly ate the breakfast he had brought. He was charmed to see 
that between them they left not a crumb. 
When Makali rose her face had lost the knotted look, and her dark eyes, though 
still large and still concerned, were tranquil. She has a peaceful heart, he 
thought. At the same moment his physician's eye caught the signs; she was 
pregnant, probably about three months along. She whispered to the child, who 
trotted away. She came back to the chair at the bedside, which he had already 
relinquished. 
"I am going to examine and dress his wound," Hamid said. "Will you watch, dema, 
or come back?" 
"Watch," she said. 
"Good," he said. Taking off his coat, he asked her to have hot water sent in 
from the kitchen. 
"We have it piped," she said, and went to a door in the farthest shadowy corner. 
He had not expected such an amenity. Yet he knew that some of these island farms 
were very ancient places of civilization, drawing for their comfort and 
provision on inexhaustible sun, wind, and tide, settled in a way of life as 
immemorial as that of their plow-lands and pastures, as full and secure. Not the 
show-wealth of the city, but the deep richness of the land, was in the steaming 
pitcher she brought him, and in the woman who brought it. 
"You don't need it boiling?" she asked, and he said, "This is what I want." 
She was quick and steady, relieved to have a duty, to be of use. When he bared 
the great sword-wound across her husband's abdomen he glanced up at her to see 
how she took it. Compressed lips, a steady gaze. 
"This," he said, his fingers above the long, dark, unhealed gash, "looks the 
worst; but this, here, is the worst. That is superficial, a mere slash as the 
sword withdrew. But here, it went in, and deep." He probed the wound. There was 
no shrinking or quiver in the man's body; he lay insensible. "The sword 
withdrew," Hamid went on, "as the swordsman died. Your husband killed him even 
as he struck. And took the sword from him. When his men came around him he was 
holding it in his left hand and his own sword in his right, though he could not 
rise from his knees. . . . Both those swords came here with us. . . . There, you 
see? That was a deep thrust. And a wide blade. That was nearly a deathblow. But 

not quite, not quite. Though to be sure, it took its toll." He looked up at her 
openly, hoping she would meet his eyes, hoping to receive from her the glance of 
acceptance, intelligence, recognition that he had seen in this face and that 
among Sandry's people. But her eyes were on the purple and livid wound, and her 
face was simply intent. 
"Was it wise to move him, carry him so far?" she asked, not questioning his 
judgment, but in wonder. 
"The Doctor said it would do him no harm," Hamid said. "And it has done none. 
The fever is gone, as it has been for nine days now." She nodded, for she had 
felt how cool Farre's skin was. "The inflammation of the wound is, if anything, 
less than it was two days ago. The pulse and breath are strong and steady. This 
was the place for him to be, dema." 
"Yes," she said. "Thank you. Thank you, Hamiddem." Her clear eyes looked into 
his for a moment before returning to the wound, the motionless, muscular body, 
the silent face, the closed eyelids. 
Surely, Hamid thought, surely if it were true she'd know it! She couldn't have 
married the man not knowing! But she says nothing. So it's not true, it's only a 
story. . . . But this thought, which gave him a tremendous relief for a moment, 
gave way to another: She knows and is hiding from the knowledge. Shutting the 
shadow into the locked room. Closing her ears in case the word is spoken. 
He found he had taken a deep breath and was holding it. He wished the Farmwife 
were older, tougher, that she loved her farmer less. He wished he knew what the 
truth was, and that he need not be the one to speak it. 
But on an utterly unexpected impulse, he spoke: "It is not death," he said, very 
low, almost pleading. 
She merely nodded, watching. When he reached for a clean cloth, she had it ready 
to his hand. 
As a physician, he asked her of her pregnancy. She was well, all was well. He 
ordered her to walk daily, to be two hours out of the sickroom in the open air. 
He wished he might go with her, for he liked her and it would have been a 
pleasure to walk beside her, watching her go along tall and lithe and robust. 
But if she was to leave Farre's side for two hours, he was to replace her there: 
that was simply understood. He obeyed her implicit orders as she obeyed his 
explicit ones. 

His own freedom was considerable, for she spent most of the day in the sickroom, 
and there was no use his being there, too, little use his being there at all; in 
fact: Farre needed nothing from him or her or anyone, aside from the little 
nourishment he took. Twice a day, with infinite patience, she contrived to feed 
him ten or a dozen sips of Dr. Saker's rich brew of meat and herbs and 
medicines, which Hamid concocted and strained daily in the kitchen with the 
cooks' interested aid. Aside from those two half hours, and once a day the 
bed-jar for a few drops of urine, there was nothing to be done. No chafing or 
sores developed on Farre's skin. He lay unmoving, showing no discomfort. His 
eyes never opened. Once or twice, she said, in the night, he had moved a little, 
shuddered. Hamid had not seen him make any movement for days. 
Surely, if there was any truth in the old book Dr. Saker had shown him and in 
Pask's unwilling and enigmatic hints of confirmation, Makali would know? But she 
said never a word, and it was too late now for him to ask. He had lost his 
chance. And if he could not speak to her, he would not go behind her back, 
asking the others if there was any truth in this tale. 
Of course there isn't, he told his conscience. A myth, a rumor, a folktale of 
the 'Old Islanders'. . . and the word of an ignorant man, a saddler. . . . 
Superstition! What do I see when I look at my patient? A deep coma. A deep, 
restorative coma. Unusual, yes, but not abnormal, not uncanny. Perhaps such a 
coma, a very long vegetative period of recovery, common to these islanders, an 
inbred people, would be the origin of the myth, much exaggerated, made fanciful. 
. . . 
They were a healthy lot, and though he offered his services he had little to do 
once he had reset a boy's badly splinted arm and scraped out an old fellow's leg 
abscesses. Sometimes little Idi tagged after him. Clearly she adored her father 
and missed his company. She never asked, "Will he get well," but Hamid had seen 
her crouched at the bedside, quite still, her cheek against Farre's unresponding 
hand. Touched by the child's dignity, Hamid asked her what games she and her 
father had played. She thought a long time before she said, "He would tell me 
what he was doing and sometimes I could help." Evidently she had simply followed 
Farre in his daily round of farmwork and management. Hamid provided only an 
unsatisfactory, frivolous substitute. She would listen to his tales of the court 
and city for a while, not very interested, and soon would run off to her own 
small, serious duties. Hamid grew restive under the burden of being useless. 
He found walking soothed him, and went almost daily on a favorite circuit: down 
to the quay and along the dunes to the southeast end of the island, from which 
he first saw the open sea, free at last of the whispering green levels of the 
reedbeds. Then up the steepest slope on Sandry, a low hill of worn granite and 

sparse earth, for the view of sea and tidal dams, island fields and green 
marshes from its summit, where a cluster of windmills caught the sea wind with 
slender vanes. Then down the slope past the trees, the Old Grove, to the 
farmhouse. There were a couple of dozen houses in sight from Sandry Hill, but 
'the farmhouse' was the only one so called, as its owner was called the 
Husbandman, or Farmer Sandry, or simply Sandry if he was away from the island. 
And nothing would keep an Islander away from his island but his duty to the 
crown. Rooted folk, Hamid thought wryly, standing in the lane near the Old Grove 
to look at the trees. 
Elsewhere on the island, indeed on all the islands, there were no trees to speak 
of. Scrub willows down along the streams, a few orchards of wind-dwarfed, 
straggling apples. But here in the Grove were great trees, some with mighty 
trunks, surely hundreds of years old, and none of them less than eight or ten 
times a man's height. They did not crowd together but grew widely spaced, each 
spreading its limbs and crown broadly. In the spacious aisles under them grew a 
few shrubs and ferns and a thin, soft, pleasant grass. Their shade was beautiful 
on these hot summer days when the sun glared off the sea and the channels and 
the sea wind scarcely stirred the fiery air. But Hamid did not go under the 
trees. He stood in the lane, looking at that shade under the heavy foliage. 
Not far from the lane he could see in the grove a sunny gap where an old tree 
had come down, perishing in a winter gale maybe a century ago, for nothing was 
left of the fallen trunk but a grassy hummock a few yards long. No sapling had 
sprung up or been planted to replace the old tree; only a wild rose, rejoicing 
in the light, flowered thornily over the ruin of its stump: 
Hamid walked on, gazing ahead at the house he now knew so well, the massive 
slate roofs, the shuttered win-dow of the room where Makali was sitting beside 
her husband, waiting for him to wake. 
"Makali, Makali," he said under his breath, grieving for her, angry with her, 
angry with himself, sorry for himself, listening to the sound of her name. 
The room was dark to his still sun-bedazzled eyes, but he went to his patient 
with a certain decisiveness, almost abruptness, and turned back the sheet. He 
palpated, auscultated, took the pulse. "His breathing has been harsh," Makali 
murmured. 
"He's dehydrated. Needs water." 
She rose to fetch the little silver bowl and spoon she used to feed him his soup 
and water, but Hamid shook his head. The picture in Dr. Saker's ancient book was 

vivid in his mind, a woodcut, showing exactly what must be done--what must be 
done, that is, if one believed this myth, which he did not, nor did Makali, or 
she would surely have said something by now! And yet, there was nothing else to 
be done. Farre's face was sunken, his hair came loose at a touch. He was dying, 
very slowly, of thirst. 
"The bed must be tipped; so that his head is high, his feet low," Hamid said 
authoritatively. "The easiest way will be to take off the footboard. Tebra will 
give me a hand." She went out and returned with the yardman, Tebra, and with him 
Hamid briskly set about the business. They got the bed fixed at such a slant 
that he had to put a webbing strap round Farre's chest to keep him from sliding 
quite down. He asked Makali for a waterproof sheet or cape. Then, fetching a 
deep copper basin from the kitchen, he filled it with cold water. He spread the 
sheet of oilskin she had brought under Farre's legs and feet, and propped the 
basin in an overturned footstool so that it held steady as he laid Farre's feet 
in the water. 
"It must be kept full enough that his soles touch the water," he said to Makali. 
"It will keep him cool," she said, asking, uncertain. Hamid did not answer. 
Her troubled, frightened look enraged him. He left the room without saying more. 
When he returned in the evening she said, "His breathing is much easier." 
No doubt, Hamid thought, auscultating, now that he breathes once a minute. 
"Hamiddem," she said, "there is . . . something I noticed " 
"Yes:" 
She heard his ironic, hostile tone, as he did. Both winced. But she was started, 
had begun to speak, could only go on. 
"His . . ." She started again. "It seemed . . ." She drew the sheet down 
farther, exposing Farre's genitals. 
The penis lay almost indistinguishable from the testicles and the brown, grained 
skin of the inner groin, as if it had sunk into them, as if all were returning 
to an indistinguishable unity, a featureless solidity. 
"Yes," Hamid said, expressionless, shocked in spite of himself. "The . . . the 
process is following . . . what is said to be its course." 

She looked at him across her husband's body. "But-- Can't you--?" 
He stood silent a while. "It seems that-- My information is that in these 
cases--a very grave shock to the system, to the body,"--he paused, trying to 
find words--"such as an injury or a great loss, a grief--but in this case, an 
injury, an almost fatal wound-- A wound that almost certainly would have been 
fatal, had not it inaugurated the . . . the process in question, the inherited 
capacity . . . propensity . . ." 
She stood still, still gazing straight at him, so that all the big words shrank 
to nothing in his mouth. He stooped and with his deft, professional gentleness 
opened Farre's closed eyelid. "Look!" he said. She too stooped to look, to see 
the blind eye exposed, without pupil, iris, or white, a polished, featureless, 
brown bead. 
When her indrawn breath was repeated and again repeated in a dragging sob, Hamid 
burst out at last, "But you knew, surely! You knew when you married him." 
"Knew," said her dreadful indrawn voice. 
The hair stood up on Hamid's arms and scalp. He could not look at her. He 
lowered the eyelid, thin and stiff as a dry leaf. 
She turned away and walked slowly across the long room into the shadows. 
"They laugh about it," said the deep, dry voice he had never heard, out of the 
shadows. "On the land, in the city, people laugh about it, don't they. They talk 
about the wooden men, the blockheads, the Old Islanders. They don't laugh about 
it here. When he married me--" She turned to face Hamid, stepping into the shaft 
of warm twilight from the one unshuttered window so that her clothing glimmered 
white. "When Farre of Sandry, Farre Older courted me and married me, on the 
Broad Isle where I lived, the people there said don't do it to me, and the 
people here said don't do it to him. Marry your own kind, marry in your own 
kind. But what did we care for that? He didn't care and I didn't care. I didn't 
believe! I wouldn't believe! But I came here-- Those trees, the Grove, the older 
trees--you've been there, you've seen them. Do you know they have names?" She 
stopped, and the dragging, gasping, indrawn sob began again. She took hold of a 
chair back and stood racking it back and forth: "He took me there. 'That is my 
grandfather,'" she said in a hoarse, jeering gasp. "'That's Alta, my mother's 
grandmother. Dorandem has stood four hundred years.'" 
Her voice failed. 

"We don't laugh about it," Hamid said. "It is a tale--something that might be 
true--a mystery. Who they are, the . . . the olders, what makes them change . . 
. how it happens. . . . Dr. Saker sent me here not only to be of use but to 
learn. To verify . . . the process." 
"The process," Makali said. 
She came back to the bedside, facing him across it, across the stiff body, the 
log in the bed. 
"What am I carrying here?" she asked, soft and hoarse, her hands on her belly. 
"A child," Hamid said, without hesitating and clearly. 
"What kind of child?" 
"Does it matter?" 
She said nothing. 
"His child, your child, as your daughter is. Do you know what kind of child Idi 
is?" 
After a while Makali said softly, "Like me. She does not have the amber eyes." 
"Would you care less for her if she did?" 
"No," she said. 
She stood silent. She looked down at her husband, then toward the windows, then 
straight at Harold. 
"You came to learn," she said. 
"Yes. And to give what help I can give." 
She nodded. "Thank you," she said. 
He laid his hand a moment on his heart. 
She sat down in her usual place beside the bed with a deep, very quiet breath, 
too quiet to be a sigh. 

Hamid opened his mouth. "He's blind, deaf, without feeling. He doesn't know if 
you're there or not there. He's a log, a block, you need not keep this vigil!" 
All these words said themselves aloud in his mind, but he did not speak one of 
them. He closed his mouth and stood silent. 
"How long?" she asked in her usual soft voice. 
"I don't know. That change . . . came quickly. Maybe not long now." 
She nodded. She laid her hand on her husband's hand, her light warm touch on the 
hard bones under hard skin, the long, strong, motionless fingers. "Once," she 
said, "he showed me the stump of one of the olders, one that fell down a long 
time ago." 
Hamid nodded, thinking of the sunny clearing in the grove, the wild rose. 
"It had broken right across in a great storm, the trunk had been rotten. It was 
old, ancient, they weren't sure even who . . . the name . . . hundreds of years 
old. The roots were still in the ground but the trunk was rotten. So it broke 
right across in the gale. But the stump was still there in the ground. And you 
could see. He showed me." After a pause she said, "You could see the bones. The 
leg bones. In the trunk of the tree. Like pieces of ivory. Inside it. Broken off 
with it." After another silence, she said, "So they do die. Finally." 
Hamid nodded. 
Silence again. Though he listened and watched almost automatically, Hamid did 
not see Farre's chest rise or fall. 
"You may go whenever you like, Hamiddem," she said gently. "I'm all right now. 
Thank you." 
He went to his room. On the table, under the lamp when he lighted it, lay some 
leaves. He had picked them up from the border of the lane that went by the 
grove, the grove of the older trees. A few dry leaves, a twig What their blossom 
was, their fruit, he did not know. It was summer, between the flower and the 
seed. And he dared not take a branch, a twig, a leaf from the living tree. 
When he joined the people of the farm for supper, old Pask was there. 
"Doctor-dem," the saddler said in his rumbling bass, "is he turning?" 

"Yes," Hamid said. 
"So you're giving him water?" 
"Yes." 
"You must give him water, dema," the old man said, relentless. "She doesn't 
know. She's not his kind. She doesn't know his needs." 
"But she bears his seed," said Hamid, grinning suddenly, fiercely, at the old 
man. 
Pask did not smile or make any sign, his stiff face impassive. He said, "Yes. 
The girl's not, but the other may be older." And he turned away. 
Next morning after he had sent Makali out for her walk, Hamid studied Farre's 
feet. They were extended fully into the water, as if he had stretched downward 
to it, and the skin looked softer. The long brown toes stretched apart a little. 
And his hands, still motionless, seemed longer, the fingers knotted as with 
arthritis yet powerful, lying spread on the coverlet at his sides. 
Makali came back ruddy and sweaty from her walk in the summer morning. Her 
vitality, her vulnerability were infinitely moving and pathetic to Hamid after 
his long contemplation of a slow, inexorable toughening, hardening, withdrawal. 
He said, "Makali-dem, there is no need for you to be here all day. There is 
nothing to do for him but keep the water-basin full." 
"So it means nothing to him that ! sit by him," she said, half questioning half 
stating. 
"I think it does not. Not any more." 
She nodded. 
Her gallantry touched him. He longed to help her. "Dema, did he, did anyone ever 
speak to you about--if this should happen-- There may be ways we can ease the 
change, things that are traditionally done-- I don't know them. Are there people 
here whom I might ask--Pask and Dyadi--?" 
"Oh, they'll know what to do when the time comes," she said, with an edge in her 
voice. "They'll see to it that it's done right. The right way, the old way. You 
don't have to worry about that. The doctor doesn't have to bury his patient, 
after all. The grave diggers do that." 

"He is not dead." 
"No. Only blind and deaf and dumb and doesn't know if I'm in the room or a 
hundred miles away." She looked up at Hamid, a gaze which for some reason 
embarrassed him. "If I stuck a knife in his hand would he feel it?" she asked. 
He chose to take the question as one of curiosity, desire to know. "The response 
to any stimulus has grown steadily less," he said, "and in the last few days it 
has disappeared. That is, response to any stimulus I've offered." He took up 
Farre's wrist and pinched it as hard as he could, though the skin was so tough 
now and the flesh so dry that he had difficulty doing so. 
She watched. "He was ticklish," she said. Hamid shook his head. He touched the 
sole of the long brown foot that rested in the basin of water; there was no 
withdrawal, no response at all. 
"So he feels nothing. Nothing hurts him," she said. 
"I think not." 
"Lucky him." 
Embarrassed again, Hamid bent down to study the wound. He had left off the 
bandages, for the slash had closed, leaving a clean seam, and the deep gash had 
developed a tough lip all round it, a barky ring that was well on the way to 
sealing it shut. 
"I could carve my name on him," Makali said, leaning close to Hamid, and then 
she bent down over the inert body, kissing and stroking and holding it; her 
tears running down. 
When she had wept a while, Hamid went to call the women of the household, and 
they came gathering round her full of solace and took her off to an,other room. 
Left alone, Hamid drew the sheet back up over Farre's chest; he felt a 
satisfaction in her having wept at last, having broken down. Tears were the 
natural reaction, and the necessary one. A woman clears her mind by weeping, a 
woman had told him once. 
He flicked his thumbnail hard against Farre's shoulder. It was like flicking the 
headboard, the night table--his nail stung for a moment. He felt a surge of 
anger against his patient, no patient, no man at all, not any more. 

Was his own mind clear? Why was he angry with Farre? Could the man help being 
what he was, or what he was becoming? 
Hamid went out of the house and walked his circuit, went to his own room to 
read. Late in the afternoon he went to the sickroom. No one was there with 
Farre. He pulled out the chair she had sat in so many days and nights and sat 
down. The shadowy silence of the room soothed his mind. A healing was occurring 
here: a strange healing, a mystery, frightening, but real. Farre had traveled 
from mortal injury and pain to this quietness; had turned from death to this 
different, this other life, this older life. Was there any wrong in that? Only 
that he wronged her in leaving her behind, and he must have done that, and more 
cruelly, if he had died. 
Or was the cruelty in his not dying? 
Hamid was still there pondering, half asleep in the twilit serenity of the room, 
when Makali came in quietly and lighted a dim lamp. She wore a loose, light 
shirt that showed the movement of her full breasts, and her gauze trousers were 
gathered at the ankle above her bare feet; it was a hot night, sultry, the air 
stagnant on the salt marshes and the sandy fields of the island. She came around 
the bedstead. Hamid started to get up. 
"No, no, stay. I'm sorry, Hamid-dem. Forgive me. Don't get up. I only wanted to 
apologize for behaving like a child." 
"Grief must find its way out," he said. 
"I hate to cry. Tears empty me. And pregnancy makes one cry over nothing." 
"This is a grief worth crying for, dema." 
"Oh, yes," she said. "If we had loved each other. Then I might have cried that 
basin full." She spoke with a hard lightness. "But that was over years ago. He 
went off to the war to get away from me. This child I carry, it isn't his. He 
was always cold, always slow. Always what he is now." She looked down at the 
figure in the bed with a quick, strange, challenging glance. 
"They were right," she said, "half-alive shouldn't marry the living. If your 
wife was a stick, was a stump, a lump of wood, wouldn't you seek some friend of 
flesh and blood? Wouldn't you seek the love of your own kind?" 
As she spoke she came nearer to Hamid, very near, stooping over him. Her 
closeness, the movement of her clothing, the warmth and smell of her body, 

filled his world suddenly and entirely, and when she laid her hands on his 
shoulders he reached up to her, sinking upward into her, pulling her down onto 
him to drink her body with his mouth, to impale her heavy softness on the aching 
point of his desire, so lost in her that she had pulled away from him before he 
knew it. She was turning from him, turning to the bed, where with a long, 
creaking groan the stiff body trembled and shook, trying to bend, to rise, and 
the round blank balls of the eyes stared out under lifted eyelids. 
"There!" Makali cried, breaking free of Hamid's hold, standing triumphant. 
"Farre!" 
The stiff half-lifted arms, the outspread fingers trembled like branches in the 
wind. No more than that. Again the deep, cracking, creaking groan from within 
the rigid body. She huddled up against it on the tilted bed, stroking the face 
and kissing the unblinking eyes, the lips, the breast, the scarred belly, the 
lump between the joined, grown-together legs. "Go back now," she murmured, "go 
back to sleep. Go back, my dear, my own, my love, go back now, now I know, now I 
know . . ." 
Hamid broke from his paralysis and left the room, the house, striding blindly 
out into the luminous midsummer night. He was very angry with her, for using 
him; presently with himself, for being usable. His outrage began to die away as 
he walked. Stopping, seeing where he was, he gave a short, rueful, startled 
laugh. He had gone astray off the lane, following a path that led right into the 
Old Grove, a path he had never taken before. All around him, near and far, the 
huge trunks of the trees were almost invisible under the massive darkness of 
their crowns. Here and there the moonlight struck through the foliage, making 
the edges of the leaves silver, pooling like quicksilver in the grass. It was 
cool under the older trees, windless, perfectly silent. 
Harold shivered: "He'll be with you soon," he said to the thick-bodied, 
huge-armed, deep-rooted, dark presences. "Pask and the others know what to do. 
He'll be here soon. And she'll come here with the baby, summer afternoons, and 
sit in his shade. Maybe she'll be buried here. At his roots. But I am not 
staying here." He was walking as he spoke, back toward the farmhouse and the 
quay and the channels through the reeds and the roads that led inland, north, 
away. "If you don't mind, I'm on my way, right away. . . . " 
The olders stood unmoved as he hurried out from under them and strode down the 
lane, a dwindling figure, too slight, too quick to be noticed. 

CHAPTER I 
Mending the green Pitcher 
SAILS LONG AND WHITE as swans wings carried the ship Farflyer through summer air down the bay 
from the Armed Cliffs toward Gont Port. She glided into the still water landward of the jetty so sure and 
graceful a creature of the wind that a couple of townsmen fishing off the old quay cheered her in, 
waving to the crewmen and the one passen-ger standing in the prow 
He was a thin man with a thin pack and an old black cloak, probably a sorcerer or small tradesman, 
nobody im-portant. The two fishermen watched the bustle on the dock and the ship�s deck as she made 
ready to unload her cargo, and only glanced at the passenger with a bit of curiosity when as he left the 
ship one of the sailors made a gesture be-hind his back, thumb and first and last finger of the left hand 
all pointed at him: May you never come back! 
He hesitated on the pier, shouldered his pack, and set off into the streets of Gont Port. They were busy 
streets, and he got at once into the Fish Market, abrawl with hawkers and hagglers, paving stones 
glittering with fish scales and brine. If he had a way, he soon lost it among the carts and stalls and 
crowds and the cold stares of dead fish. 
A tall old woman turned from the stall where she had been insulting the freshness of the herring and the 
veracity of the fishwife. Seeing her glaring at him, the stranger said un-wisely, �Would you have the 
kindness to tell me the way I should go for Re Albi?� 
�Why, go drown yourself in pig slop for a start,� said the tall woman and strode off, leaving the stranger 
wilted and dismayed. But the fishwife, seeing a chance to seize the high moral ground, blared out, �Re 
Albi is it? Re Albi you want, man? Speak up then! The Old Mage�s house, that would be what you�d 
want at Re Albi. Yes it would. So you go out by the corner there, and up Elvers Lane there, see, till you 
reach the tower... 
Once he was out of the market, broad streets led him up-hill and past the massive watchtower to a town 
gate. Two stone dragons large as life guarded it, teeth the length of his forearm, stone eyes glaring 
blindly out over the town and the bay. A lounging guard told him just turn left at the top of the road and 
he�d be in Re Albi. �And keep on through the vil-lage for the Old Mage�s house,� the guard said. 
So he went trudging up the road, which was pretty steep, looking up as he went to the steeper slopes and 

far peak of Gont Mountain that overhung its island like a cloud. 
It was a long road and a hot day. He soon had his black cloak off and went on bareheaded in his 
shirtsleeves, but he had not thought to find water or buy food in the town, or 
had been too shy to, maybe, for he was not a man familiar with cities or at ease with strangers. 
After several long miles he caught up to a cart which he had seen far up the dusty way for a long time as 
a dark blot in a white blot of dust. It creaked and screaked along at the pace of a pair of small oxen that 
looked as old, wrinkled, and unhopeftil as tortoises. He greeted the carter, who resembled the oxen. The 
carter said nothing, but blinked. 
�Might there be a spring of water up the road?� the stranger asked. 
The carter slowly shook his head. After a long time he said, �No.� A while later he said, �There ain�t.� 
They all plodded along. Discouraged, the stranger found it hard to go any faster than the oxen, about a 
mile an hour, maybe. 
He became aware that the carter was wordlessly reaching something out to him: a big clay jug wrapped 
round with wicker. He took it, and finding it very heavy, drank his fill of the water, leaving it scarcely 
lighter when he passed it back with his thanks. 
�Climb on,� said the carter after a while. 
�Thanks. I�ll walk. How far might it be to Re Albi?� 
The wheels creaked. The oxen heaved deep sighs, first one, then the other. Their dusty hides smelled 
sweet in the hot sunlight. 
�Ten mile,� the carter said. He thought, and said, �Or twelve.� After a while he said, �No less.� 
�I�d better walk on, then,� said the stranger. 
Refreshed by the water, he was able to get ahead of the oxen, and they and the cart and the carter were a 
good way 
behind him when he heard the carter speak again. �Going to the Old Mage�s house,� he said. If it was a 
question, it seemed to need no answer. The traveler walked on. 
When he started up the road it had still lain in the vast shadow of the mountain, but when he turned left 
to the little village he took to be Re Albi, the sun was blazing in the western sky and under it the sea lay 
white as steel. 
There were scattered small houses, a small dusty square, a fountain with one thin stream of water falling. 
He made for that, drank from his hands again and again, put his head under the stream, rubbed cool 
water through his hair and let it run down his arms, and sat for a while on the stone rim of the fountain, 
observed in attentive silence by two dirty little boys and a dirty little girl. 
�He ain�t the farrier,� one of the boys said. 
The traveler combed his wet hair back with his fingers. 
�He�ll be going to the Old Mage�s house,� said the girl, �stupid.� 
�Yerraghh!� said the boy, drawing his face into a horrible lopsided grimace by pulling at it with one 
hand while he clawed the air with the other. 
�You watch it, Stony,� said the other boy. 
�Take you there,� said the girl to the traveler. 
�Thanks,� he said, and stood up wearily. 
�Got no staff, see,� said one boy, and the other said, �Never said he did.� Both watched with sullen eyes 
as the stranger followed the girl out of the village to a path that led north through rocky pastures that 
dropped down steep to the left. 

The sun glared on the sea. His eyes dazzled, and the 
high horizon and the blowing wind made him dizzy. The child was a little hopping shadow ahead of 
him. He stopped. 
�Come on,� she said, but she too stopped. He came up to her on the path. �There,� she said. He saw a 
wooden house near the cliff�s edge, still some way ahead. 
�I ain�t afraid,� the girl said. �I fetch their eggs lots of times for Stony�s dad to carry to market. Once she 
gave me peaches. The old lady. Stony says I stole �em but I never. Go on. She ain�t there. Neither of �em 
is.� 
She stood still, pointing to the house. 
�Nobody�s there?� 
�The old man is. Old Hawk, he is.� 
The traveler went on. The child stood watching him till he went round the corner of the house. 
Two GOATS STARED down at the stranger from a steep fenced field. A scatter of hens and half-grown 
chicks pecked and conversed softly in long grass under peach and plum trees. A man was standing on a 
short ladder against the trunk of one of the trees; his head was in the leaves, and the traveler could see 
only his bare brown legs. 
�Hello,� the traveler said, and after a while said it again a bit louder. 
The leaves shook and the man came briskly down the ladder. He carried a handftil of plums, and when 
he got off the ladder he batted away a couple of bees drawn by the juice. He came forward, a short, 
straight-backed man, grey hair tied back from a handsome, timeworn face. He looked to be seventy or 
so. Old scars, four white seams, ran from his left cheekbone down to the jaw. His gaze was clear, direct, 
intense. �They�re ripe,� he said, �though they�ll be even better tomorrow.� He held out his handful of 
little yellow plums. 
�Lord Sparrowhawk,� the stranger said huskily. �Arch-mage. 
The old man gave a curt nod of acknowledgment. �Come into the shade,� he said. 
The stranger followed him, and did what he was told: he sat down on a wooden bench in the shade of the 
gnarled tree nearest the house; he accepted the plums, now rinsed and served in a wicker basket; he ate 
one, then another, then a third. Questioned, he admitted that he had eaten nothing that day. He sat while 
the master of the house went into it, coming out presently with bread and cheese and half an onion. The 
guest ate the bread and cheese and onion and drank the cup of cold water his host brought him. The host 
ate plums to keep him company. 
�You look tired. How far have you come?� 
�From Roke.� 
The old man�s expression was hard to read. He said only, �I wouldn�t have guessed that.� 
�I�m from Taon, lord. I went from Taon to Roke. And there the Lord Patterner told me I should come 
here. To you. 
�Why?� 
It was a formidable gaze. 
�Because you walked across the dark land living.. .� The stranger�s husky voice died away. 
The old man picked up the words: �And came to the far shores of the day. Yes. But that was spoken in 
prophecy of the coming of our King, Lebannen.� 
�You were with him, lord.� 

�I was. And he gained his kingdom there. But I left mine there. So don�t call me by any title. Hawk, or 
Sparrowhawk, as you please. And how shall I call you?� 
The man murmured his use-name: �Alder.� 
Food and drink and shade and sitting down had clearly eased him, but he still looked exhausted. He had 
a weary sadness in him; his face was frill of it. 
The old man had spoken to him with a hard edge in his voice, but that was gone when he said, �Let�s put 
off talking for a bit. You�ve sailed near a thousand miles and walked fif-teen uphill. And I�ve got to 
water the beans and the lettuce and all, since my wife and daughter left the garden in my charge. So rest 
a while. We can talk in the cool of the evening. Or the cool of the morning. There�s seldom as much 
hurry as I used to think there was. 
When he came back by half an hour later his guest was flat on his back asleep in the cool grass under the 
peach trees. 
The man who had been Archmage of Earthsea stopped with a bucket in one hand and a hoe in the other 
and looked down at the sleeping stranger. 
�Alder,� he said under his breath. �What�s the trouble you bring with you, Alder?� 
It seemed to him that if he wanted to know the mans true name he would know it only by thinking, by 
putting his mind to it, as he might have done when he was a mage. 
But he did not know it, and thinkir~g would not give it to him, and he was not a mage. 
He knew nothing about this Alder and must wait to be 
told. �Never trouble trouble,� he told himself, and went on to water the beans. 
As SOON AS THE SUN�S LIGHT was cut off by a low rock wall that ran along the top of the cliff near 
the house, the cool of the shadow roused the sleeper. He sat up with a shiver, then stood up, a bit stiff 
and bewildered, with grass seed in his hair. Seeing his host filling buckets at the well and lugging them 
to the garden, he went to help him. 
�Three or four more ought to do it,� said the cx-Archmage, doling out water to the roots of a row of 
young cabbages. The smell of wet dirt was pleasant in the dry, warm air. The westering light came 
golden and broken over the ground. 
They sat on a long bench beside the house door to see the sun go down. Sparrowhawk had brought out a 
bottle and two squat, thick cups of greenish glass. �My wife�s son�s wine,� he said. �From Oak Farm, in 
Middle Valley. A good year, seven years back.� It was a flinty red wine that warmed Alder right 
through. The sun set in calm clarity. The wind was down. Birds in the orchard trees made a few closing 
remarks. 
Alder had been amazed when he learned from the Mas-ter Patterner of Roke that the Archmage 
Sparrowhawk, that man of legend, who had brought the king home from the realm of death and then 
flown off on a dragon�s back, was still alive. Alive, said the Patterner, and living on his home island, 
Gont. �I tell you what not many know,� the Patterner had said, �for I think you need to know it. And I 
think you will keep his secret.� 
�But then he is still Archmage!� Alder had said, with a kind of joy: for it had been a puzzle and concern 
to all men of the art that the wise men of Roke Island, the school and center of magery in the 
Archipelago, had not in all the years of King Lebannen�s rule named an Archmagc to replace 
Sparrowhawk. 
�No,� the Patterner had said. �He is not a mage at all.� 

The Patterner had told him a little of how Sparrowhawk had lost his power, and why; and Alder had had 
time to pon-der it all. But still, here, in the presence of this man who had spoken with dragons, and 
brought back the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, and crossed the kingdom of the dead, and ruled the Archipelago 
before the king, all those stories and songs were in his mind. Even as he saw him old, content with his 
gar-den, with no power in him or about him but that of a soul made by a long life of thought and action, 
he still saw a great mage. And so it troubled him considerably that Sparrow- hawk had a wife. 
Awife, a daughter, a stepson... Mages had no family. A common sorcerer like Alder might marry or 
might not, but the men of true power were celibate. Alder could imagine this man riding a dragon, that 
was easy enough, but to think of him as a husband and father was another matter. He couldn�t manage it. 
He tried. He asked, �Your-wife - She�s with her son, then?� 
Sparrowhawk came back from far away. His eyes had been on the western gulfs. �No,� he said. �She�s 
in Havnor. With the king. 
After a while, coming all the way back, he added, �She went there with our daughter just after the Long 
Dance. 
Lebannen sent for them, to take counsel. Maybe on the same matter that brings you here to me. We�ll 
see... But the truth is, I�m tired this evening, and not much disposed to weighing heavy matters. And you 
look tired too. So a bowl of soup, maybe, and another glass of wine, and sleep? And we�ll talk in the 
morning.� 
�All with pleasure, lord,� Alder said, �but for the sleep. That�s what I fear.� 
It took the old man a while to register this, but then he said, �You fear to sleep?� 
�Dreams.� 
�fAh.� A keen glance from the dark eyes under eyebrows grown tangled and half grey. �You had a good 
nap there in the grass, I think.� 
�The sweetest sleep I�ve had since I left Roke Island. I�m grateful to you for that boon, lord. Maybe it 
will return tonight. But if not, I struggle with my dream, and cry out, and wake, and am a burden to 
anyone near me. I�ll sleep out-side, if you permit.� 
Sparrowhawk nodded. �It�ll be a pleasant night,� he said. 
It was a pleasant night, cool, the sea wind mild from the south, the stars of summer whitening all the sky 
except where the broad, dark summit of the mountain loomed. Alder put down the pallet and sheepskin 
his host gave him, in the grass where he had slept before. 
Sparrowhawk lay in the little western alcove of the house. He had slept there as a boy, when it was 
Ogion�s house and he was Ogion�s prentice in wizardry. Tehanu had slept there these last fifteen years, 
since she had been his daughter. With her and Tenar gone, when he lay in his and 
Te nar�s bed in the dark back corner of the single room he felt his solitude, so he had taken to sleeping in 
the alcove. He liked the narrow cot built out from the thick house wall of timbers, right under the 
window. He slept well there. But this night he did not. 
Before midnight, wakened by a cry, voices outside, he leapt up and went to the door. It was only Alder 
struggling with nightmare, amid sleepy protests from the henhouse. Alder shouted in the thick voice of 
dream and then woke, starting up in panic and distress. He begged his host�s par-don and said he would 
sit up a while under the stars. Spar-rowhawk went back to bed. He was not wakened again by Alder, but 
he had a bad dream of his own. 
He was standing by a wall of stone near the top of a long hillside of dry grey grass that ran down from 
dimness into the dark. He knew he had been there before, had stood there before, but he did not know 

when, or what place it was. Someone was standing on the other side of the wall, the downhill side, not 
far away. He could not see the face, only that it was a tall man, cloaked. He knew that he knew him. The 
man spoke to him, using his true name. He said, �You will soon be here, Ged.� 
Cold to the bone, he sat up, staring to see the space of the house about him, to draw its reality around 
him like a blanket. He looked out the window at the stars. The cold came into his heart then. They were 
not the stars of summer, beloved, familiar, the Cart, the Falcon, the Dancers, the Heart of the Swan. 
They were other stars, the small, still stars of the dry land, that never rise or set. He had known their 
names, once, when he knew the names of things. 
�Avert!� he said aloud and made the gesture to turn away misfortune that he had learned when he was 
ten years old. His gaze went to the open doorway of the house, the corner behind the door, where he 
thought to see darkness taking shape, clotting together and rising up. 
But his gesture, though it had no power, woke him. The shadows behind the door were only shadows. 
The stars out the window were the stars of Earthsea, paling in the first re-flection of the dawn. 
He sat holding his sheepskin up round his shoulders, watching those stars fade as they dropped west, 
watching the growing brightness, the colors of light, the play and change of coming day. There was a 
grief in him, he did not know why, a pain and yearning as for something dear and lost, for-ever lost. He 
was used to that; he had held much dear, and lost much; but this sadness was so great it did not seem to 
be his own. He felt a sadness at the very heart of things, a grief even in the coming of the light. It clung 
to him from his dream, and stayed with him when he got up. 
He lit a little fire in the big hearth and went to the peach trees and the henhouse to gather breakfast. 
Alder came in from the path that ran north along the cliff top; he had gone for a walk at first light, he 
said. He looked jaded, and Spar-rowhawk was struck again by the sadness in his face, which echoed the 
deep aftermood of his own dream. 
They had a cup of the warmed barley gruel the country people of Gont drink, a boiled egg, a peach; they 
ate by the hearth, for the morning air in the shadow of the mountain was too cold for sitting outdoors. 
Sparrowhawk looked after his livestock: fed the chickens, scattered grain for doves, let 
the goats into the pasture. When he came back they sat again on the bench in the dooryard. The sun was 
not over the mountain yet, but the air had grown dry and warm. 
�Now tell me what brings you here, Alder. But since you came by Roke, tell me first if things are well in 
the Great House. 
�I did not enter it, my lord.� 
�Ah.� A neutral tone but a sharp glance. 
�I was only in the Immanent Grove.� 
�Ah.� A neutral tone, a neutral glance. �Is the Patterner well?� 
�He told me, �Carry my love and honor to my lord and say to him: I wish we walked in the Grove 
together as we used to do.�� 
Sparrowhawk smiled a little sadly. After a while he said, �So. But he sent you to me with more to say 
than that, I think.� 
�I will try to be brief.� 
�Man, we have all day before us. And I like a story told from the beginning.� 
So Alder told him his story from the beginning. 
He was a witch�s son, born in the town of Elini on Taon, the Isle of the Harpers. 
Taon is at the southern end of the Sea of Ea, not far from where Sol�a lay before the sea whelmed it. 

That was the an-cient heart of Earthsea. All those islands had states and cities, kings and wizards, when 
Havnor was a land of feud-ing tribesmen and Gont a wilderness ruled by bears. People born on Ea or 
Eb�a, Enlad or Taon, though they may be a ditchdigger�s daughter or a witch�s son, consider themselves 
to be descendants of the Elder Mages, sharing the lineage of the warriors who died in the dark years for 
Queen Elfarran. Therefore they often have a fine courtesy of manner, though sometimes an undue 
haughtiness, and a generous, uncalcu-lating turn of mind and speech, a way of soaring above mere fact 
and prose, which those whose minds stay close to mer-chandise distrust. �Kites without strings,� say the 
rich men of Havnor of such people. But they do not say it in the hearing of the king, Lebannen of the 
House of Enlad. 
The best harps in Earthsea are made on Taon, and there are schools of music there, and many famous 
singers of the Lays and Deeds were born or learned their art there. Elini, however, is just a market town 
in the hills, with no music about it, Alder said; and his mother was a poor woman, though not, as he put 
it, hungry poor. She had a birthmark, a red stain from the right eyebrow and ear clear down over her 
shoulder. Many women and men with such a blemish or difference about them become witches or 
sorcerers perforce, �marked for it,� people say. Blackberry learned spells and could do the most ordinary 
kind of witchery; she had no real gift for it, but she had a way about her that was almost as good as the 
gift itself. She made a living, and trained her son as well as she could, and saved enough to prentice him 
to the sorcerer who gave him his true name. 
Of his father Alder said nothing. He knew nothing. Blackberry had never spoken of him. Though seldom 
celi-bate, witches seldom kept company more than a night or two with any man, and it was a rare thing 
for a witch to marry a man. Far more often two of them lived their lives together, 
and that was called witch marriage or she-troth. A witch�s child, then, had a mother or two mothers, but 
no father. That went without saying, and Sparrowhawk asked nothing on that score; but he asked about 
Alder�s training. 
The sorcerer Gannet had taught Alder the few words he knew of the True Speech, and some spells of 
finding and il-lusion, at which Alder had shown, he said, no talent at all. But Gannet took enough 
interest in the boy to discover his true gift. Alder was a mender. He could rejoin. He could make whole. 
A broken tool, a knife blade or an axle snapped, a pottery bowl shattered: he could bring the fragments 
back together without joint or seam or weakness. So his master sent him about seeking various spells of 
mending, which he found mostly among witches of the island, and he worked with them and by himself 
to learn to mend. 
�That is a kind of healing,� Sparrowhawk said. �No small gift, nor easy craft.� 
�It was a joy to me,� Alder said, with a shadow of a smile in his face. �Working out the spells, and 
finding sometimes how to use one of the True Words in the work. . . To put back together a barrel that�s 
dried, the staves all fallen in from the hoops-that�s a real pleasure, seeing it build up again, and swell out 
in the right curve, and stand there on its bottom ready for the wine.. . There was a harper from Meoni, a 
great harper, oh, he played like a storm on the high hills, like a tempest on the sea. He was hard on the 
harp strings, twanging and pulling them in the passion of his art, so they�d break at the very height and 

flight of the music. And so he hired me to be there near him when he played, 
and when he broke a string I�d mend it quick as the note itself and he�d play on.� 
Sparrowhawk nodded with the warmth of a fellow professional talking shop. �Have you mended glass?� 
he asked. 
�I have, but it�s a long, nasty job,� Alder said, �with all the tiny little bits and speckles glass goes to.� 
�But a big hole in the heel of a stocking can be worse, Sparrowhawk said, and they discussed mending 
for a while longer, before Alder returned to his story. 
He had become a mender, then, a sorcerer with a modest practice and a local reputation for his gift. 
When he was about thirty, he went to the principal city of the island, Meoni, with the harper, who was 
playing for a wedding there. A woman sought him out in their lodging, a young woman, not trained as a 
witch; but she had a gift, she said, the same as his, and wanted him to teach her. And indeed she had a 
greater gift than his. Though she knew not a word of the Old Speech, she could put a smashed jug back 
together or mend a frayed-out rope just with the movements of her hands and a wordless song she sang 
under her breath, and she had healed broken limbs of animals and people, which Alder had never dared 
try to do. 
So rather than his teaching her, they put their skills to-gether and taught each other more than either had 
ever known. She came back to Elini and lived with Alder�s mother Blackberry who taught her various 
useful appearances and effects and ways of impressing customers, if not much actual witch knowledge. 
Lily was her name; and Lily and Alder worked together there and in all the hill towns nearby, as their 
reputation grew. 
�And I came to love her,� Alder said. His voice had changed when he began to speak of her, losing its 
hesitancy, growing urgent and musical. 
�Her hair was dark, but with a shining of red gold in it,� he said. 
There was no way he could hide his love from her, and she knew it and returned it. Whether she was a 
witch now or not, she said she did not care; she said the two of them were born to be together, in their 
work and in their life; she loved him and would be married to him. 
So they were married, and lived in very great happiness for a year, and half a second year. 
�Nothing was wrong at all until the time came for the child to be born,� Alder said. �But it was late, and 
then very late. The midwives tried to bring on the birth with herbs and spells, but it was as if the child 
would not let her bear it. It would not be separated from her. It would not be born. And it was not born. 
It took her with it.� 
After a while he said, �We had great joy.� 
�I see that.� 
�And my sorrow was in that degree.� 
The old man nodded. 
�I could bear it,� Alder said. �You know how it is. There was not much reason to be living that I could 
see, but I could bear it.� 
�Yes.� 
�But in the winter. Two months after her death. There was a dream came to me. She was in the dream.� 
�Tell it.� 

�I stood on a hillside. Along the top of the hill and 
running down the slope was a wall, low, like a boundary wall between sheep pastures. She was standing 
across the wall from me, below it. It was darker there.� 
Sparrowhawk nodded once. His face had gone rock hard. 
�She was calling to me. I heard her voice saying my name, and I went to her. I knew she was dead, I 
knew it in the dream, but I was glad to go. I couldn�t see her clear, and I went to her to see her, to be 
with het And she reached out across the wall. It was no higher than my heart. I had thought she might 
have the child with her, but she did not. She was reaching her hands out to me, and so I reached out to 
her, and we took each other�s hands.� 
�You touched?� 
�I wanted to go to her, but I could not cross the wall. My legs would not move. I tried to draw her to me, 
and she wanted to come, it seemed as if she could, but the wall was there between us. We couldn�t get 
over it. So she leaned across to me and kissed my mouth and said my name. And she said, �Set me free!� 
�I thought if I called her by her true name maybe I could free her, bring her across that wall, and I said, 
�Come with me, Mevre!� But she said, �That�s not my name, Hara, that�s not my name any more.� And 
she let go my hands, though I tried to hold hen She cried, �Set me free, Hara!� But she was going down 
into the dark. It was all dark down that hillside below the wall. I called her name and her use-name and 
all the dear names I had had for her; but she went on away. So then I woke.� 
Sparrowhawk gazed long and keenly at his visitor �You gave me your name, Hara,� he said. 
Alder looked a little stunned, and took a couple of long breaths, but he looked up with desolate courage. 
�Who could I better trust it with?� he said. 
Sparrowhawk thanked him gravely. �I will try to deserve your trust,� he said. �Tell me, do you know 
what that place is-that wall?� 
�I did not know it then. Now I know you have crossed it.� 
�Yes. I�ve been on that hill. And crossed the wall, by the power and art I used to have. And I�ve gone 
down to the cities of the dead, and spoken to men I had known living, and sometimes they answered me. 
But Hara, you are the first man I ever knew or heard of; among all the great mages in the lore of Roke or 
Paln or the Enlades, who ever touched, who ever kissed his love across that wall.� 
Alder sat with his head bowed and his hands clenched. 
�Will you tell me: what was her touch like? Were her hands warm? Was she cold air and shadow or like 
a living woman? Forgive my questions.� 
�I wish I could answer them, my lord, On Roke the Summoner asked the same. But I can�t answer truly. 
My longing for her was so great, I wished so much---it could be I wished her to be as she was in life. But 
I don�t know. In dream not all things are clear.� 
�In dream, no. But I never heard of any man coming to the wall in dream. It is a place a wizard may seek 
to come to, if he must, if he�s learned the way and has the power But without the knowledge and the 
power; only the dying can--� 
And then he broke off; remembering his dream of the night before. 
�I took it for a dream,� Alder said. �It troubled me, but I 
cherished it. It was like a harrow on my heart�s wound to think of it, and yet I held to that pain, held it 
close to me. I wanted it. I hoped to dream again.� 
�Did you?� 

�Yes. I dreamed again.� 
He looked unseeing into the blue gulf of air and ocean west of where they sat. Low and faint across the 
tranquil sea lay the sunlit hills of Kameben Behind them the sun was breaking bright over the 
mountain�s northern shoulder. 
�It was nine days after the first dream. I was in that same place, but high up on the hill. I saw the wall 
below me across the slope. And I ran down the hill, calling out her name, sure of seeing hen There was 
someone there. But when I came close, I saw it wasn�t Lily. It was a man, and he was stooping at the 
wall, as if he was repairing it. I said to him, �Where is she, where is Lily?� He didn�t answer or look up. I 
saw what he was doing. He wasn�t working to mend the wall but to unbuild it, prying with his fingers at 
a great stone. The stone never moved, and he said, �Help me, Hara!� Then I saw that it was my teacher, 
Gannet, who named me. He has been dead these five years. He kept prying and straining at the stone 
with his fingers, and said my name again-�Help me, set me free.� And he stood up and reached out to me 
across the wall, as she had done, and caught my hand. But his hand burned, with fire or with cold, I 
don�t know, but the touch of it burned me so that I pulled away, and the pain and fear of it woke me 
from the dream.� 
He held his hand out as he spoke, showing a darkness on the back and palm like an old bruise. 
�I�ve learned not to let them touch me,� he said in a low voice. 
Ged looked at Alder�s mouth. There was a darkening across his lips too. 
�Hara, you�ve been in mortal danger,� he said, also softly. 
�There is more. 
Forcing his voice against silence, Alder went on with his story 
The next night when he slept again he found himself on that dim hill and saw the wall that dropped 
down from the hilltop across the slope. He went down towards it, hoping to find his wife there. �I didn�t 
care if she couldn�t cross it, if I couldn�t, so long as I could see her and talk to her,� he said. But if she 
was there he never saw her among all the others: 
for as he came closer to the wall he saw a crowd of shadowy people on the other side, some clear and 
some dim, some he seemed to know and others he did not know, and all of them reached out their hands 
to him as he approached and called him by his name: �Hara! let us come with you! Hara, set us free!� 
�It�s a terrible thing to hear one�s true name called by strangers,� Alder said, �and it�s a terrible thing to 
be called by the dead.� 
He tried to turn and climb back up the hill, away from the wall; but his legs had the awful weakness of 
dream and would not carry him. He fell to his knees to keep himself from being drawn down to the wall, 
and called out for help, though there was no one to help him; and so he woke in terror. 
Since then, every night that he slept deeply, he found 
himself standing on the hill in the dry grey grass above the wall, and the dead would crowd thick and 
shadowy below it, pleading and crying to him, calling his name. 
�I wake,� he said, �and I�m in my own room. I�m not there, on that hillside. But I know they are. And I 
have to sleep. I try to wake often, and to sleep in daylight when 1 can, but I have to sleep at last. And 
then I am there, and they are there. And I can�t go up the hill. If I move it�s always downhill, towards the 
wall. Sometimes I can turn my back to them, but then I think I hear Lily among them, crying to me. And 
I turn to look for her. And they reach out to me. 
He looked down at his hands gripping each other. 

�What am I to do?� he said. 
Sparrowhawk said nothing. 
After a long time Alder said, �The harper I told you of was a good friend to me. After a while he saw 
there was something amiss, and when I told him that I couldn�t sleep for fear of my dreams of the dead, 
he urged me and helped me to take ship�s passage to Ea, to speak to a grey wizard there.� He meant a 
man trained in the School on Roke. �As soon as that wizard heard what my dreams were he said I must 
go to Roke.� 
�What is his name?� 
�Beryl. He serves the Prince of Ea, who is Lord of the Isle of Taon.� 
The old man nodded. 
�He had no help to give me, he said, but his word was as good as gold to the ship�s master. So I went on 
the water again. That was a long journey, coasting clear round Havnor and down the Inmost Sea. I 
thought maybe being on the 
water, far from Taon, always farther, I might leave the dream behind me. The wizard on Ea called that 
place in my dream the dry land, and I thought maybe I�d be going away from it, going on the sea. But 
every night I was there on the hillside. And more than once in the night, as time went on. Twice, or three 
times, or every time my eyes close, I�m on the hill, and the wall below me, and the voices calling me. So 
I�m like a man crazy with the pain of a wound who can find peace only in sleep, but the sleep is my 
torment, with the pain and an-guish of the wretched dead all crowding at the wall, and my fear of them.� 
The sailors soon began to shun him, he said, at night be-cause he cried out and woke them with his 
miserable waken-ings, and in daylight because they thought there was a curse on him or a gebbeth in 
him. 
�And no relief for you on Roke?� 
�In the Grove,� Alder said, and his face changed entirely when he said the word. 
Sparrowhawk�s face had the same look for a moment. 
�The Master Patterner took me there, under those trees, and I could sleep. Even at night I could sleep. In 
daylight, if the sun�s on me-it was like that in the afternoon, yesterday, here-if the warmth of the sun�s 
on me and the red of the sun shines through my eyelids, I don�t fear to dream. But in the Grove there 
was no fear at all, and I could love the night again. 
�Tell me how it was when you came to Roke.� 
Though hampered by weariness, anguish, and awe, Alder had the silver tongue of his island; and what 
he left out for fear of going on too long or telling the Archmage what 
he already knew, his listener could well imagine, remember-ing when he himself first came to the Isle of 
the Wise as a boy of fifteen. 
When Alder left the ship at the docks at Thwil Town, one of the sailors had drawn the rune of the Closed 
Door on the top of the gangplank to prevent his ever coming back aboard. Alder noticed it, but he 
thought the sailor had good cause. He felt himself ill-omened; he felt he bore darkness in him. That 
made him shyer than he would have been in any case in a strange town. And Thwil was a very strange 
town. 
�The streets lead you awryi Sparrowhawk said. 
�They do that, my lord!-I�m sorry, my tongue will obey my heart, and not you-� 
�Never mind. I was used to it once. I can be Lord Goatherd again, if it eases your speech. Go on. 

Misdirected by those he asked, or misunderstanding the directions, Alder wandered about the hilly little 
labyrinth of Thwil Town with the School always in sight and never able to get to it, until, having reached 
despair, he came to a plain door in a bare wall on a dull square. After staring at it a while he recognised 
the wall was the one he had been trying to get to. He knocked, and a man with a quiet face and quiet 
eyes opened the doon 
Alder was ready to say that he had been sent by the wiz-ard Beryl of Ea with a message for the Master 
Summoner, but he didn�t have a chance to speak. The Doorkeeper gazed at him a moment and said 
mildly, �You cannot bring them into this house, friend.� 
Alder did not ask who it was he could not bring with him. He knew. He had slept scarcely at all the past 
nights, 
snatching fragments of sleep and waking in terror, dozing off in the daylight, seeing the dry grass 
sloping down through the sunlit deck of the ship, the wall of stones across the waves of the sea. And 
waking, the dream was in him, with him, around him, veiled, and he could hear, always, faintly, through 
all the noises of wind and sea, the voices that cried his name. He did not know if he was awake now or 
asleep. He was crazy with pain and fear and weariness. 
�Keep them out,� he said, �and let me in, for pity�s sake let me in!� 
�Wait here,� the man said, as gently as before. �There s a bench,� pointing. And he closed the door. 
Alder went and sat down on the stone bench. He re-membered that, and he remembered some boys of 
fifteen or so looking curiously at him as they went by and entered that door but what happened for some 
while after he could recall only in fragments. 
The Doorkeeper came back with a young man with the staff and cloak of a Roke wizard. Then Alder 
was in a room, which he understood was in a lodging house. There the Master Summoner came and tried 
to talk with him. But Alder by then was not able to talk. Between sleep and wak-ing, between the sunlit 
room and the dim grey hill, between the Summoner�s voice speaking to him and the voices calling him 
across the wall, he could not think and he could not move, in the living world. But in the dim world 
where the voices called, he thought it would be easy to walk on down those few steps to the wall and let 
the reaching hands take him and hold him. If he was one of them they would let him be, he thought. 
Then, as he remembered, the sunlit room was altogether gone, and he was on the grey hill. But with him 
stood the Summoner of Roke: a big, broad, dark-skinned man, with a great staff of yew wood that 
shimmered in the dim place. 
The voices had ceased calling. The people, the crowding figures at the wall, were gone. He could hear a 
distant rustle and a kind of sobbing as they went down into the darkness, went away. 
The Summoner stepped to the wall and put his hands on it. 
The stones had been loosened here and there. A few had fallen and lay on the dry grass. Alder felt that 
he should pick them up and replace them, mend the wall, but he did not. 
The Summoner turned to him and asked, �Who brought you here?� 
�My wife, Mevre.� 
�Summon her here.� 
Alder stood dumb. At last he opened his mouth, but it was not his wife�s true name that he spoke but her 
use-name, the name he had called her in life. He said it aloud, �Lily.. The sound of it was not like a 
white flower, but like a pebble dropping on dust. 
No sound. Stars shone small and steady in the black sky. Alder had never looked up at the sky in this 

place before. He did not recognise the stars. 
�Mevre!� said the Summoner, and in his deep voice spoke some words in the Old Speech. 
Alder felt the breath go out of him and could barely stand. But nothing stirred on the long slope that led 
down to formless dark. 
Then there was some movement, something lighter, coming up the hill, coming slowly nearer. Alder 
shook with fear and yearning, and whispered, �Oh my dear love.� 
But the figure as it came closer was too small to be Lily. He saw it was a child of twelve or so, girl or 
boy he could not tell. It paid no heed to him or the Summoner and never looked across the wall, but 
settled down just under it. When Alder came closer and looked down he saw the child was prying and 
pulling at the stones, trying to loosen one, then another. 
The Summoner was whispering in the Old Speech. The child glanced up once indifferently and went on 
tugging at the stones with its thin fingers that seemed to have no strength in them. 
This was so horrible to Alder that his head spun; he tried to turn away, and beyond that he could 
remember nothing till he woke in the sunny room, lying in bed, weak and sick and cold. 
People looked after him: the aloof smiling woman who kept the lodging house, and a brown-skinned, 
stocky old man who came with the Doorkeeper. Alder took him for a physician-sorcerer. Only after he 
had seen him with his staff of olive wood did he understand that he was the Herbal, the master of healing 
of the School on Roke. 
His presence brought solace, and he was able to give Alder sleep. He brewed up a tea and had Alder 
drink it, and lighted some herb that burned slowly with a smell like the dark earth under pine woods, and 
sitting nearby began a long, soft chant. �But I must not sleep,� Alder protested, feeling sleep coming into 
him like a great dark tide. The 
healer laid his warm hand on Alder�s hand. Then peace came into Alder, and he slipped into sleep 
without fear So long as the healer�s hand was on his, or on his shoulder, it kept him from the dark 
hillside and the wall of stones. 
He woke to eat a little, and soon the Master Herbal was there again with the tepid, insipid tea and the 
earth-smelling smoke and the dull untunefrl chant and the touch of his hand; and Alder could have rest. 
The healer had all his duties at the School, so could be there only some hours of the night. Alder got 
enough rest in three nights that he could eat and walk about the town a little in the day and think and talk 
coherently. On the fourth morning the three masters, the Herbal, the Doorkeeper, and the Summoner; 
came to his room. 
Alder bowed to the Summoner with dread, almost dis-trust, in his heart. The Herbal was also a great 
mage, but his art was not altogether different from Alder�s own craft, so they had a kind of 
understanding; and there was the great kindness of his hand. The Summoner, though, dealt not with 
bodily things but with the spirit, with the minds and wills of men, with ghosts, with meanings. His art 
was arcane, dangerous, fill of risk and threat. And he had stood beside Alder there, not in the body, on 
the bounda% at the wall. With him the darkness and the fear returned. 
None of the three mages said anything at first. If they had one thing in common, it was a great capacity 
for silence. 
So Alder spoke, trying to say what was in his heart, for nothing less would do. 
�If I did some wrong that brought me to that place, or brought my wife to me there, or the other souls, if 
I can 

mend or undo what I did, I will. But I don�t know what it is I did.� 
�Or what you are,� the Summoner said. 
Alder was mute. 
�Not many of us know who or what we are,� said the Doorkeeper. �A glimpse is all we get.� 
�Tell us how you first went to the wall of stones,� the Summoner said. 
And Alder told them. 
The mages listened in silence and said nothing for a while after he was done. Then the Summoner asked, 
�Have you thought what it means to cross that wall?� 
�I know I could not come back.� 
�Only mages can cross the wall living, and only at utmost need. The Herbal may go with a sufferer all 
the way to that wall, but if the sick man crosses it, he does not follow.� 
The Summoner was so tall and broad-bodied and dark that, looking at him, Alder thought of a bear 
�My art of Summoning empowers us to call the dead back across the wall for a brief time, a moment, if 
there is need to do so. I myself question if any need could justiI~ so great a breach in the law and 
balance of the world. I have never made that spell. Nor have I crossed the wall. The Archmage did, and 
the King with him, to heal the wound in the world the wizard called Cob made.� 
�And when the Archmage did not return, Thorion, who was our Summoner then, went down into the dry 
land to seek him,� the Herbal said. �He came back, but changed.� 
�There is no need to speak of that,� the big man said. 
�Maybe there is,� said the Herbal. �Maybe Alder needs 
to know it. Thorion trusted his strength too far, I think. He stayed there too long. He thought he could 
summon himself back into life, but what came back was only his skill, his power, his ambition-the will 
to live that gives no life. Yet we trusted him, because we had loved him. So he devoured us. Until Irian 
destroyed him.� 
Far from Roke, on the Isle of Gont, Alder�s listener inter-rupted him- �What name was that?� 
Sparrowhawk asked. 
�Irian, he said.� 
�Do you know that name?� 
�No, my lord.� 
�Nor I.� After a pause Sparrowhawk went on softly, as if unwillingly. �But I saw Thorion, there. In the 
dry land, where he had risked going to seek me. It grieved me to see him there. I said to him he might go 
back across the wall.� His face went dark and grim. �That was ill spoken. Allis spoken ill between the 
living and the dead. But I had loved him too.� 
They sat in silence. Sparrowhawk got up abruptly to stretch his arms and rub his thighs. They both 
moved about a bit. Alder got a drink of water from the well. Sparrowhawk fetched out a garden spade 
and the new handle to fit to it, and set to work smoothing the oaken shaft and tapering the end that 
would go in the socket. 
He said, �Go on, Alder,� and Alder went on with his story 
The two masters had been silent for a while after the Herbal spoke about Thorion. Alder got up the 
courage to ask them about a matter that had been much on his mind: 
how those who died came to the wall, and how the mages came there. 
The Summoner answered promptly: �It is a spirit journey.� 
The old healer was more hesitant. �It�s not in the body that we cross the wall, since the body of one who 

dies stays here. And if a mage goes there in vision, his sleeping body is still here, alive. And so we call 
that voyager.., we call what makes that journey from the body, the soul, the spirit.� 
�But my wife took my hand,� Alder said. He could not say again to them that she had kissed his mouth. 
�I felt her touch.� 
�So it seemed to you,� the Summoner said. 
�If they touched bodily, if a link was made,� the Herbal said to the Summoner, �might that not be why 
the other dead can come to him, call to him, even touch him?� 
�That is why he must resist them,� said the Summoner, with a glance at Alder. His eyes were small, 
fiery. 
Alder felt it as an accusation, and not a fair one. He said, �I try to resist them, my lord. I have tried. But 
there are so many of them-and she�s with them-and they�re suffering, crying out to me. 
�They cannot suffer,� the Summoner said. �Death ends all suffering.� 
�Maybe the shadow of pain is pain,� said the Herbal. �There are mountains in that land, and they are 
called Pain.� 
The Doorkeeper had scarcely spoken until now. He said in his quiet, easy voice, �Alder is a mender, not 
a breakerv I don�t think he can break that link.� 
�If he made it he can break it,� the Summoner said. 
�Did he make it?� 
�I have no such art, my lord,� Alder said, so frightened by what they were saying that he spoke angrily 
�Then I must go down among them,� said the Summoner 
�No, my friend,� said the Doorkeepe; and the old Herbal said, �You last of us all.� 
�But this is my art.� 
�And ours. 
�Who then?� 
The Doorkeeper said, �It seems Alder is our guide. Hav-ing come to us for help, maybe he can help us. 
Let us all go with him in his vision-to the wall, though not across it.� 
So that night, when late and fearftilly Alder let sleep overcome him, and found himself on the grey hill, 
the others were with him: the Herbal, a warm presence in the chill; the Doorkeeper, elusive and silvery 
as starlight; and the massive Summoner, the bear, a dark strength. 
This time they were standing not where the hill ran down into the dark, but on the near slope, looking up 
to the top. The wall in this place ran along the crest of the hill and was low, little more than knee height. 
Above it the sky with its few small stars was perfectly black. 
Nothing moved. 
It would be hard to walk uphill to the wall, Alder thought. Always before it had been below him. 
But if he could go to it maybe Lily would be there, as she had been the first time. Maybe he could take 
her hand, and the mages would bring her back with him. Or he could step over the wall where it was so 
low and come to her. 
He began to walk up the hill. It was easy, it was no trouble, he was almost there. 
�Hara!� 
The Summoner�s deep voice called him back like a 
noose round his neck, a jerked leash. He stumbled, stag-gered forward one step more, almost at the wall, 
dropped to his knees and reached out to the stones. He was crying, �Save me!� but to whom? To the 
mages, or to the shadows beyond the wall? 

Then hands were on his shoulders, living hands, strong and warm, and he was in his room, with the 
healer�s hands indeed on his shoulders, and the werelight burning white around them. And there were 
four men in the room with him, not three. 
The old Herbal sat down on the bed with him and soothed him a while, for he was shaking, shuddering, 
sob-bing. �I can�t do it,� he kept saying, but still he did not know if he was talking to the mages or to the 
dead. 
When the fear and pain began to lessen, he felt tired be-yond bearing, and looked almost without interest 
at the man who had come into the room. His eyes were the color of ice, his hair and skin were white. A 
far Northerner, from Enwas or Bereswek, Alder thought him. 
This man said to the mages, �What are you doing, my friends?� 
�Taking risks, Azver,� said the old Herbal. 
�Trouble at the border, Patterner,� said the Summoner 
Adder could feel the respect they had for this man, their relief that he was there, as they told him briefly 
what the trouble was. 
�If he�ll come with me, will you let him go?� the Pat-temer asked when they were done, and turning to 
Alder, �You need not fear your dreams in the Immanent Grove. And so we need not fear your dreams.� 
They all assented. The Patterner nodded and vanished. He was not there. 
He had not been there; he had been a sending, a pre-sentment. It was the first time Alder had seen the 
great pow-ers of these masters made manifest, and it would have unnerved him if he had not been past 
amazement and fear. 
He followed the Doorkeeper out into the night, through the streets, past the walls of the School, across 
fields under a high round hill, and along a stream singing its water music softly in the darkness of its 
banks. Ahead of them was a high wood, the trees crowned with grey starlight. 
The Master Patterner came along the path to meet them, looking just as he had in the room. He and the 
Door-keeper spoke for a minute, and then Alder followed the Pat-terner into the Grove. 
�The trees are dark,� Alder said to Sparrowhawk, �but it isn�t dark under them. There is a light-a 
lightness there.� 
His listener nodded, smiling a little. 
�As soon as I came there, I knew I could sleep. I felt as if I�d been asleep all along, in an evil dream, and 
now, here, I was truly awake: so I could truly sleep. There was a place he took me to, in among the roots 
of a huge tree, all soft with the fallen leaves of the tree, and he told me I could lie there. And I did, and I 
slept. I cannot tell you the sweetness of it.� 
THE MIDDAY SUN had grown strong; they went indoors, and the host set out bread and cheese and a 
bit of dried meat. Alder looked round him as they ate. The house had only the one long room with its 
little western alcove, but it was large and darkly aity strongly built, with wide boards and beams, 
a gleaming floor, a deep stone fireplace. �This is a noble house,� Alder said. 
�An old one. They call it the Old Mage�s house. Not for me, nor for my master Aihal who lived here, but 
for his mas-ter Heleth, who with him stilled the great earthquake. It�s a good house.� 
Alder slept a while again under the trees with the sun shining on him through the moving leaves. His 
host rested too, but not long; when Alder woke, there was a good-sized basket of the small golden plums 
under the tree, and Spar-rowhawk was up in the goat pasture mending a fence. Alder went to help him, 
but the job was done. The goats, however, were long gone. 

�Neither of �em�s in milk,� Sparrowhawk grumbled as they returned to the house. �They�ve got nothing 
to do but find new ways through the fence. I keep them for exaspera-tion. . . The first spell I ever learned 
was to call goats from wandering. My aunt taught me. It�s no more use to me now than if I sang them a 
love song. I�d better go see if they�ve got into the widower�s vegetables. You don�t have the kind of sorcery 
to charm a goat to come, do you?� 
The two brown nannies were indeed invading a cabbage patch on the outskirts of the village. Alder 
repeated the spell Sparrowhawk told him: 
Noth hierth malk man, 
hiolk han merth han! 
The goats gazed at him with alert disdain and moved away a little. Shouting and a stick got them out of 
the cabbages onto the path, and there Sparrowhawk produced some plums 
from his pocket. Promising, offering, and cajoling, he slowly led the truants back into their pasture. 
�They�re odd creatures,� he said, latching the gate. �You never know where you are with a goat.� 
Alder thought that he never knew where he was with his host, but did not say it. 
When they were sitting in the shade again, Spar-rowhawk said, �The Patterner isn�t a Northerner, he�s a 
Karg. Like my wife. He was a warrior of Karego-At. The only man I know of who ever came from those 
lands to Roke. The Kargs have no wizards. They distrust all sorcery But they�ve kept more knowledge 
of the Old Powers of the Earth than we have. This man, Azver, when he was young, he heard some tale 
of the Immanent Grove, and it came to him that the center of all the earth�s powers must be there. So he 
left his gods and his native tongue behind him and made his way to Roke. He stood on our doorstep and 
said, �Teach me to live in that forest!� And we taught him, till he began to teach us... So he became our 
Master Patterner. He�s not a gentle man, but he is to be trusted.� 
�I never could fear him,� Alder said. �It was easy to be with him. He�d take me far into the wood with 
him.� 
They were both silent, both thinking of the glades and aisles of that wood, the sunlight and starlight in its 
leaves. 
�It is the heart of the world,� Alder said. 
Sparrowhawk looked up eastward at the slopes of Gont Mountain, dark with trees. �I�ll go walking 
there,� he said, in the forest, come autumn. 
After a while he said, �Tell me what counsel the Pat-terner had for you, and why he sent you here to me. 
�He said, my lord, that you knew more of the.., the dry land than any living man, and so maybe you 
would under-stand what it means that the souls there come to me as they do, begging me for freedom.� 
�Did he say how he thinks it came about?� 
�Yes. He said that maybe my wife and I didn�t know how to be parted, only how to be joined. That it 
was not my doing, but was maybe ours together, because we drew each to the other, like drops of 
quicksilver. But the Master Sum-moner didn�t agree. He said that only a great power of magery could so 
transgress the order of the world. Because my old master Gannet also touched me across the wall, the 
Summoner said maybe it was a mage power in him which had been hidden or disguised in life, but now 
was revealed.� 
Sparrowhawk brooded a while. �When I lived on Roke,� he said, �I might have seen it as the Summoner 

does. There I knew no power stronger than what we call magery. Not even the Old Powers of the Earth, 
I thought... If the Sum-moner you met is the man I think, he came as a boy to Roke. My old friend Vetch 
of Iffish sent him to study with us. And he never left. That�s a difference between him and Azver the 
Patterner. Azver lived till he was grown as a warrior�s son, a warrior himself, among men and women, 
in the thick of life. Matters that the walls of the School keep out, he knows in his flesh and blood. He 
knows that men and women love, make love, marry... Having lived these fifteen years outside the walls, 
I incline to think Azver might be on the better track. The bond between you and your wife is stronger 
than the division between life and death.� 
Alder hesitated. �I�ve thought it might be so. But it 
seems.., shameless to think it. We loved each other, more than I can say we loved each othe; but was our 
love greater than any other before us? Was it greater than Morred�s and Elfarran�s?� 
�Maybe not less.� 
�How can that be?� 
Sparrowhawk looked at him as if saluting something, and answered him with a care that made Alder feel 
honored. �Well,� he said slowly, �sometimes there�s a passion that comes in its springtime to ill fate or 
death. And because it ends in its beauty, it�s what the harpers sing of and the poets make stories of: the 
love that escapes the years. That was the love of the Young King and Elfarran. That was your love, 
Hara. It wasn�t greater than Morred�s, but was his greater than yours?� 
Alder said nothing, pondering. 
�There�s no less or greater in an absolute thing,� Spar-rowhawk said. �All or nothing at all, the true lover 
says, and that�s the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity And rightly. How can 
it die when it�s life it-self? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in 
that bond?� 
He spoke softly but with fire and energy; then he leaned back, and after a minute said, with a half smile, 
�Every oaf of a farm boy sings that, every young girl that dreams of love knows it. But it�s not a thing 
the Masters of Roke are famil-iar with. The Patterner maybe knew it early. I learned it late. Very late. 
Not quite too late.� He looked at Alder, the fire still in his eyes, challenging. �You had that,� he said. 
�I did.� Alder drew a deep breath. Presently he said, 
�Maybe they�re there together, in the dark land. Morred and Effarran.� 
�No,� Sparrowhawk said with bleak certainty 
�But if the bond is true, what can break it?� 
�There are no lovers there.� 

�Then what are they, what do they do, there in that land? You�ve been there, you crossed the wall. You 
walked and spoke with them. Tell me!� 
�I will.� But Sparrowhawk said nothing for a while. �I don�t like to think about it,� he said. He rubbed 
his head and scowled. �You saw.. .You�ve seen those stars. Little, mean stars, that never move. No 
moon. No sunrise... There are roads, if you go down the hill. Roads and cities. On the hill there�s grass, 
dead grass, but farther down there�s only dust and rocks. Nothing grows. Dark cities. The multitudes of 
the dead stand in the streets, or walk on the roads to no end. They don�t speak. They don�t touch. They 
never touch.� His voice was low and dry. �There Morred would pass Elfarran and never turn his head, 
and she wouldn�t look at him... There�s no rejoining there, Hara. No bond. The mother doesn�t hold her 
child, there.� 
�But my wife came to me,� Alder said, �she called my name, she kissed my mouth!� 
�Yes. And since your love wasn�t greater than any other mortal love, and since you and she aren�t 
mighty wizards whose power might change the laws of life and death, there-fore, therefore something 
else is in this. Something is hap-pening, is changing. Though it happens through you and to you, you are 
its instrument and not its cause.� 
Sparrowhawk stood up and strode to the beginning of 
the path along the cliff and back to Alder; he was charged, almost quivering with tense energy, like a 
hawk about to stoop down on its prey. 
�Did your wife not say to you, when you called her by her true name, That is not my name any more-. 
�Yes, Alder whispered. 
�But how is that? We who have true names keep them when we die, it�s our use-name that is forgouen... 
This is a mystery to the learned, I can tell you, but as well as we un-derstand it, a true name is a word in 
the True Speech. That�s why only one with the gift can know a child�s name and give it. And the name 
binds the being-alive or dead. All the art of the Summoner lies in that... Yet when the master sum-moned 
your wife to come by her true name, she didn�t come to him. You called by her use-name, Lily, and she 
came to you. Did she come to you as to the one who knew her truly?� 
He gazed at Alder keenly and yet as if he saw more than the man who sat with him. After a while he 
went on, �When my master Aihal died, my wife was here with him; and as he was dying he said to her, 
It is changed, all changed He was looking across that wall. From which side I do not know. 
�And since that time, indeed there have been changes- a king on Morred�s throne, and no Archmage of 
Roke. But more than that, much more. I saw a child summon the dragon Kalessin, the Eldest: and 
Kalessin came to her; call-ing her daughter, as I do. What does that mean? What does it mean that 
dragons have been seen above the islands of the west? The king sent to us, sent a ship to Gont Port, 

asking my daughter Tehanu to come and take counsel with him 
concerning dragons. People fear that the old covenant is bro-ken, that the dragons will come to burn 
fields and cities as they did before Erreth-Akbe fought with Orm Embar. And now, at the boundary of 
life and death, a soul refUses the bond of her name... I do not understand it. All I know is that it is 
changing. It is all changing.� 
There was no fear in his voice, only fierce exultation. 
Alder could not share that. He had lost too much and was too worn out by his struggle against forces he 
could not control or comprehend. But his heart rose to that gallantry. 
�May it change for the good, my lord,� he said. 
�Be it so,� the old man said. �But change it must.� 
As THE HEAT WENT OUT of the day, Sparrowhawk said he had to walk to the village. He carried the 
basket of plums with a basket of eggs nested in it. 
Alder walked with him and they talked. When Alder understood that Sparrowhawk bartered fruit and 
eggs and the other produce of the little farm for barley and wheat flour; that the wood he burned was 
gathered patiently up in the forest, that his goats� not giving milk meant he must eke out last year�s 
cheese, Alder was amazed: how could it be that the Archmage of Earthsea lived from hand to mouth? 
Did his own people not honor him? 
When he went with him to the village, he saw women shut their doors when they saw the old man 
coming. The marketer who took his eggs and fruit tallied the count on his wooden tablet without a word, 
his face sullen and his eyes lowered. Sparrowhawk spoke to him pleasantly, �A good day to you then, 
Iddi,� but got no answer. 
�My lord,� Alder asked as they walked home, �do they know who you are?� 
�No,� said the ex-Archmage, with a dry sidelong look. �And yes.� 
�But-� Alder did not know how to speak his indignation. 
�They know I have no power of sorcery, but there�s something uncanny about me. They know I live 
with a for-eigner; a Kargish woman. They know the girl we call our daughter is something like a witch, 
but worse, because her face and hand were burnt away by fire, and because she her-self burnt up the 
Lord of Re Albi, or pushed him off the cliff or killed him with the evil eye-their stories vary They honor 
the house we live in, though, because it was Aihal�s and Heleth�s house, and dead wizards are good 
wiz~ds... You�re a townsman, Alder; of an isle of Morred�s kingdom. A village on Gont is another 
matter.� 
�But why do you stay here, lord? Surely the king would do you proper honor-� 
�I want no honor,� the old man said, with a violence that silenced Alder entirely. 
They walked on. As they came to the house built at the cliff�s edge he spoke again. �This is my eyrie,� 

he said. 
They had a glass of the red wine with supper, and another sitting out to watch the sun set. They did not 
talk much. Fear of the night, of the dream, was coming into Alden 
�I�m no healer;� his host said, �but perhaps I can do what the Master Herbal did to let you sleep.� 
Alder looked his question. 
�I�ve been thinking about it, and it seems to me maybe it 
was no spell at all that kept you away from that hillside, but just the touch of a living hand. If you like, 
we can try it.� 
Alder protested, but Sparrowhawk said, �I�m awake half most nights anyway� So the guest lay that night 
in the low bed in the back corner of the big room, and the host sat up beside him, watching the fire and 
dozing. 
He watched Alder, too, and saw him fall asleep at last; and not long after that saw him start and shudder 
in his sleep. He put out his hand and laid it on Alder�s shoulder as he lay half turned away. The sleeping 
man stirred a little, sighed, relaxed, and slept on. 
It pleased Sparrowhawk that he could do this much. As good as a wizard, he told himself with mild 
sarcasm. 
He was not sleepy; the tension was still in him. He thought about all Alder had told him, and what they 
had talked about in the afternoon. He saw Alder stand in the path by the cabbage patch saying the spell 
to call the goats, and the goats� haughty indifferen�e to the powerless words. He remembered how he 
had used to speak the name of the spaiTowhawk, the marsh hawk, the grey eagle, calling them down 
from the sky to him in a rush of wings to grasp his arm with iron talons and glare at him, eye to wrathful, 
golden eye... None of that any more. He could boast, calling this house his eyrie, but he had no wings. 
But Tehanu did. The dragon�s wings were hers to fly on. 
The fire had burned out. He pulled his sheepskin over him more closely, leaning his head back against 
the wall, still keeping his hand on Alder�s inert, warm shoulder He liked the man and was sorry for him. 
He must remember to ask him to mend the green pitcher, tomorrow 
The grass next to the wall was short, dry, dead. No wind blew to make it move or rustle. 
He roused up with a start, half rising from the chair, and after a moment of bewilderment put his hand 
back on Alder�s shoulder, grasping it a little, and whispered, �Hara! Come away, Hara.� Alder 
shuddered, then relaxed. He sighed again, turned more onto his face and lay still. 
Sparrowhawk sat with his hand on the sleeper�s arm. How had he himself come there, to the wall of 
stones? He no longer had the power to go there. He had no way to find the way. As in the night before, 
Alder�s dream or vision, Aider�s voyaging soul had drawn him with it to the edge of the dark land. 
He was wide awake now. He sat gazing at the greyish square of the west window, hill of stars. 
The grass under the w~... It did not grow farther down where the hill leveled out into the dim, dry land. 
He had said to Aider that down there was only dust, only rock. He saw that black dust, black rock. Dead 
stream beds where no water ever ran. No living thing. No bird, no field mouse cowering, no glitter and 
buzz of little insects, the creatures of the sun. Only the dead, with their empty eyes and silent faces. 
But did birds not die? 
Amouse, a gnat, a goat-a white-and-brown, clever- hoofed, yellow-eyed, shameless goat, Sippy who had 
been Tehanu�s pet, and who had died last winter at a great age - where was Sippy? 
Not in the dry land, the dark land. She was dead, but she was not there. She was where she belonged, in 
the dirt. In the dirt, in the light, in the wind, the leap of water from the rock, the yellow eye of the sun. 

Then why, then why... 
HE WATCHED ALDER mend the pitcher. Fat-bellied and jade green, it had been a favorite of Tenar�s; 
she had carried it all the way from Oak Farm, years ago. It had slipped from his hands the other day as 
he took it from the shelf He had picked up the two big pieces of it and the little fragments with some 
notion of gluing them back together so it could sit out for looks, if never for use again. Every time he 
saw the pieces, which he had put into a basket, his clumsiness had outraged him. 
Now, fascinated, he watched Aider�s hands. Slender, strong, deft, unhurried, they cradled the shape of 
the pitcher, stroking and fitting and settling the pieces of potteiy urging and caressing, the thumbs 
coaxing and guiding the smaller fragments into place, reuniting them, reassuring them. While he worked 
he murmured a two-word, tuneless chant. They were words of the Old Speech. Ged knew and did not 
know their meaning. Aider�s face was serene, all stress and sorrow gone: a face so wholly absorbed in 
time and task that timeless calm shone through it. 
His hands separated from the pitcher, opening out from it like the sheath of a flower opening. It stood on 
the oak table, whole. 
He looked at it with quiet pleasure. 
When Ged thanked him, he said, �It was no trouble at all. The breaks were very clean. It�s a well-made 
piece, and good clay It�s the shoddy work that costs to mend.� 
�I had a thought how you might find sleep,� Ged said. 
Alder had waked at first light and had got up, so that his host could go to his bed and sleep sound till 
broad day; but clearly the arrangement would not do for long. 
�Come along with me,� the old man said, and they set off inland on a path that skirted the goats� pasture 
and wound between knolls, little, half-tended fields, and inlets of the forest. Gont was a wild-looking 
place to Alder, ragged and random, the shaggy mountain always frowning and looming above. 
�It seemed to me,� Sparrowhawk said as they walked, �if I could do as well as the Master Herbal did, 
keeping you from the hill of the wall only by putting my hand on you, that there might be others who 
could help you. If you have no objection to animals.� 
�Animals?� 
�You see,� Sparrowhawk began, but got no further, inter-rupted by a strange creature bounding down 
the path to-wards them. It was bundled in skirts and shawls, feathers stuck out in all directions from its 
head, and it wore high leather boots. �0 Mastawk, 0 Mastawk!� it shouted. 
�Hello, then, Heather. Gently now,� said Sparrowhawk. The woman stopped, rocking her body, her 
head-feathers waving, a large grin on her face. �She knowed you was a- coming!� she bawled. �She 
made that hawk�s beak with her fingers like this, see, she did, and she told me go, go, with her hand! She 
Thowed you was a-coming!� 
�And so I am.� 
�To see us?� 
�To see you. Heather, this is Master Alder.� 
�Mastalder� she whispered, quieting suddenly as she in-cluded Alder in her consciousness. She shrank, 
drew into herself, looked down at her feet. 
She had no leather boots on. Her bare legs were coated from the knee down with smooth, brown, drying 
mud. Her skirts were bunched, caught up into the waistband. 
�You�ve been frogging, have you, Heather?� 

She nodded vacantly 
�I�ll go tell Aunty,� she said, beginning in a whisper and ending with a bellow, and bolted back the way 
she had come. 
�She�s a good soul,� Sparrowhawk said. �She used to help my wife. She lives with our witch now and 
helps hen I don�t think you�ll object to entering a witch�s house?� 
�Never in the world, my lord.� 
�Many do. Nobles and common folk, wizards and sorcerers. 
�Lily my wife was a witch.� 
Sparrowhawk bowed his head and walked in silence for a while. �How did she learn of her gift, Alder?� 
�It was born in hen As a child she�d make a torn branch grow on the tree again, and other children 
brought her their broken toys to mend. But when her father saw her do that he would strike her hands. 
Her family were considerable per-sons in their town. Respectable persons,� Alder said in his even, 
gentle voice. �They didn�t want her consorting with witches. Since it would keep her from marriage with 
a re-spectable man. So she kept all her study to herself. And the witches of her town would have nothing 
to do with her, even when she sought to learn from them, for they were afraid of her father, you see. 
Then a rich man came to court her, for she was beautifiil, as I told you, my lord. More beautifUl than I 
could say. And her father told her she was to be married. She ran away that night. She lived by herself 
wandering, for some years. A witch here and there took her in, but she kept herself by her skill.� 
�It�s not a big island, Taon.� 
�Her father wouldn�t seek hen He said no tinker witch was his daughter.� 
Again Sparrowhawk bowed his head. �So she heard of you, and came to you. 
�But she taught me more than I could teach her,� Alder said earnestly. �It was a great gift she had.� 
�I believe it.� 
They had come to a little house or big hut, set down in a deli, with witch hazel and broom in tangles 
about it, and a goat on the rooC and a flock of white-speckled black hens squawking away, and a lazy 
little sheepdog bitch standing up and thinking about barking and thinking better of it and waving her tail. 
Sparrowhawk went to the low doorway, stooping to look in. �There you are, Aunty!� he said. �I�ve 
brought you a visi-ton Alder, a man of sorcery from the Isle of Taon. His craft is mending, and he�s a 
master, I can tell you, for I just watched him put back together Tenar�s green pitcher, you know the one, 
that I like a clumsy old fool dropped and broke to pieces the other day.� 
He entered the hut, and Alder followed him. An old woman sat in a cushioned chair near the doorway 
where she 
could look out into the sunlight. Feathers stuck out of her wispy white ham A speckled hen was settled 
in her lap. She smiled at Sparrowhawk with enchanting sweetness and nodded politely to the visiton The 
hen woke, cackled, and departed. 
�This is Moss,� said Sparrowhawk, �a witch of many skills, the greatest of which is kindness.� 
So, Alder imagined, might the Archmage of Roke have introduced a great wizard to a great lady. He 
bowed. The old woman ducked her head and laughed a little. 
She made a circling motion with her left hand, looking a query at Sparrowhawk. 
�Tenar? Tehanu?� he said. �Still in Havnor with the king, so far as I know. They�ll be having a fine time 
there, seeing all the sights of the great city and the palaces.� 
�I made us crowns,� Heather shouted, bouncing out of the odorous, dark jumble farther inside the house. 
�Like kings and queens. See?� She preened the chicken feathers that stuck out of her thick hair at all 

angles. Aunty Moss, be-coming aware of her own peculiar headdress, batted ineffec-tively at the 
feathers with her left hand and grimaced. 
�Crowns are heavy,� Sparrowhawk said. He gently plucked the feathers from the thin ham 
�Who�s the queen, Mastawk?� Heather cried. �Who�s the queen? Bannen�s the king, who�s the queen?� 
�King Lebannen has no queen, Heathen� 
�Why not? He ought to. Why not?� 
�Maybe he�s looking for hen� 
�He�ll marry Tehanu!� the woman shrieked, joyful. �He 
Alder saw Sparrowhawk�s face change, close, become rock. 
He said only, �I doubt it.� He held the feathers he had taken from Moss�s hair and stroked them softly. 
�I�ve come to you for a favor, as always, Aunty Moss,� he said. 
She reached her good hand out and took his hand with such tenderness that Alder was moved to the 
heart. 
�I want to borrow one of your puppies.� 
Moss began to look sad. Heather, gawking beside her, puzzled it over for a minute and then shouted, 
�The puppies! Aunty Moss, the puppies! But they�re all gone!� 
The old woman nodded, looking forlorn, caressing Spar-rowhawk�s brown hand. 
�Somebody wanted them?� 
�The biggest one got out and maybe it ran up in the for-est and some creature killed it for it never came 
back and then old Ramballs, he came and said he needs sheepdogs and he�d take both and train them and 
Aunty gave them to him because they chased the new chicks Snowflakes hatched and ate out house and 
home, they did, besides.� 
�Well, Rambles may have a bit of a job training them,� Sparrowhawk said with a half smile. �I�m glad 
he�s got them but sorry they�re gone, since I wanted to borrow one for a night or two. They slept on your 
bed, didn�t they, Moss?� 
She nodded, still sad. Then, brightening a little, she looked up with her head to one side and mewed. 
Sparrowhawk blinked, but Heather understood. �Oh! The kittens!� she shouted. �Little Grey had four, 
and Old Black he killed one before we could stop him, but there�s still two or three somewhere round 
here, they sleep with Aunty 
and Biddy most every night now the little dogs are gone. Kitty! kitty! kitty! where are you, kitty kitty?� 
And after a good deal of commotion and scrambling and piercing mews in the dark interior, she 
reappeared with a grey kitten clutched squirming and squealing in her hand. �Here�s one!� she shouted, 
and threw it at Sparrowhawk. He caught it awkwardly. It instantly bit him. 
�There, there now,� he told it. �Calm down.� A tiny, rumbling growl emerged from it, and it tried to bite 
him again. Moss gestured, and he set the little creature down in her lap. She stroked it with her slow 
heavy hand. It flattened out at once, stretched, looked up at her, and purred. 
�May I borrow it for a while?� 
The old witch raised her hand from the kitten in a royal gesture that said clearly: It is yours and welcome. 
�Master Alder here is having troublesome dreams, you see, and I thought maybe having an animal with 
him nights might help to ease the trouble.� 
Moss nodded gravely and, looking up at Alder, slipped her hand under the kitten and lifted it towards 
him. Alder took it rather gingerly into his hands. It did not growl or bite. It scrambled up his arm and 
clung to his neck under his hair, which he wore loosely gathered at the nape. 

As they walked back to the Old Mage�s house, the kitten tucked inside Alder�s shirt, Sparrowhawk 
explained. �Once, when I was new to the art, I was asked to heal a child with the redfever. I ksiew the 
boy was dying, but I couldn�t bring myself to let him go. I tried to follow him. To bring him back. 
Across the wall of stones ... And so, here in the body, I fell down by the bedside and lay like the dead 
myself. 
There was a witch there who guessed what the matter was, and she had me taken to my house and laid 
abed there. And in my house was an animal that had befriended me when I was a boy on Roke, a wild 
creature that came to me of its own will and stayed with me. An otak. Do you know them? I think there 
are none in the North.� 
Alder hesitated. He said, �I know of them only from the Deed that tells of how.., how the mage came to 
the Court of the Terrenon in Osskil. And the otak tried to warn him of a gebbeth that walked with him. 
And he won free of the gebbeth, but the little animal was caught and slain.� 
Sparrowhawk walked on without speaking for twenty paces or so. �Yes,� he said. �So. Well, my otak 
also saved my life when I was caught by my own folly on the wrong side of the wall, my body lying 
here and my soul astray there. The otak came to me and washed me, the way they wash them-selves and 
their young, the way cats do, with a dry tongue, patiently, touching me and bringing me back with its 
touch, bringing me back into my body. And the gift the animal gave me was not only life but a 
knowledge as great as I ever learned on Roke ... But you see, I forget all my learning. 
�A knowledge, I say, but it�s rather a mystery. What�s the difference between us and the animals? 
Speech? All the ani-mals have some way of speaking, saying come and beware and much else; but they 
can�t tell stories, and they can�t tell lies. While we dan. 
�But the dragons speak: they speak the True Speech, the language of the Making, in which there are no 
lies, in which to tell the story is to make it be! Yet we call the dragons animals... 
�So maybe the difference isn�t language. Maybe it�s this: 
animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmfiil or useful, 
but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They 
can do harm, yes. But they�re not evil. They�re beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or 
beyond it. They have nothing to do with it. 
�We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We�re yoked, and they�re free. So 
to be with an animal is to know a little freedom ... 
�Last night, I was thinking of how witches often have a companion, a familiar. My aunt had an old dog 
that never barked. She called him Gobefore. And the Archmage Nem-merle, when I first came to Roke 
Island, had a raven that went with him everywhere. And I thought of a young woman I knew once who 
wore a little dragon-lizard, a harekki, for her bracelet. And so at last I thought of my otak. Then I 
thought, if what Alder needs to keep him on this side of the wall is the warmth of a touch, why not an 
animal? Since they see life, not death. Maybe a dog or cat is as good as a Master of Roke...� 
So it proved. The kitten, evidently happy to be away from the household of dogs and tomcats and 
roosters and the unpredictable Heather, tried hard to show that it was a reliable and diligent cat, 
patrolling the house for mice, riding on Alder�s shoulder under his hair when permitted, and set-tling 
right down to sleep purring under his chin as soon as he lay down. Alder slept all night without any 
dream he re-membered, and woke to find the kitten sitting on his chest, washing its ears with an air of 
quiet virtue. 

When Sparrowhawk tried to determine its sex, however, it growled and struggled. �All right,� he said, 
getting his hand out of danger quickly. �Have it your way It�s either a male or a female, Alder, I�m 
certain of that.� 
�I won�t name it, in any case,� Alder said. �They go out like candle flames, little cats. If you�ve named 
one you grieve more for it.� 
That day at Alder�s suggestion they went fence mending, walking the goat-pasture fence, Sparrowhawk 
on the inside and Alder on the outside. Whenever one of them found a place where the palings showed 
the beginning of rot or the tie laths had been weakened, Alder would run his hands along the wood, 
thumbing and tugging and smoothing and strengthening, a half-articulate chant almost inaudible in his 
throat and chest, his face relaxed and intent. 
Once Sparrowhawk, watching him, murmured, �And I used to take it all for granted!� 
Alder, lost in his work, did not ask him what he meant. �There,� he said, �that�ll hold.� And they moved 
on, fol-lowed closely by the two inquisitive goats, who butted and pushed at the repaired sections of 
fence as if to test them. 
�I�ve been thinking,� Sparrowhawk said, �that you might do well to go to Havnor.� 
Alder looked at him in alarm. �At,� he said. �I thought maybe, if I have a way now to keep away from.., 
that place... I could go home to Taon.� He was losing faith in what he said as he said it. 
�You might, but I don�t think it would be wise.� 
Alder said reluctantly, �It is a great deal to ask of a kitten, to defend a man against the armies of the 
dead.� 
�It is.� 
�But I-what should I do in Havnor?� And, with sud-den hope, �Would you go with me?� 
Sparrowhawk shook his head once. �I stay here.� 
�The Lord Patterner.. 
�Sent you to me. And I send you to those who should hear your tale and find out what it means... I tell 
you, Alder, I think in his heart the Patterner believes I am what I was. He believes I�m merely hiding 
here in the forests of Gont and will come forth when the need is greatest.� The old man looked down at 
his sweaty patched clothes and dusty shoes, and laughed. �In all my glory� he said. 
�Beh,� said the brown goat behind him. 
�But all the same, Alder, he was right to send you here, since she�d have been here, if she hadn�t gone to 
Havnor.� 
�The Lady Tenar?� 
�llama (kndun. So the Patterner himself called her,� Sparrowhawk said, looking across the fence at 
Alder, his eyes unfathomable. �A woman on Gont. The Woman of Gont. Tehanu.� 

CHAPTER II 
Palaces 
WHEN ALDER CAME DOWN to the docks, Farfiyer was still there, taking on a cargo of timbers; but 
he knew he had worn out his welcome on that ship. He went to a small shabby coaster fled up nat to her, 
the Pretty Rose. 
Sparrowhawk had given him a letter of passage signed by the king and sealed with the Rune of Peace. 
�He sent it for me to use if I changed my mind,� the old man had said with a snort. �It�ll serve you.� The 
ship�s master, after getting his purser to read it for him, became quite deferential and apologised for the 
cramped quarters and the length of the voyage. Pretty Rose was going to Havnor, sure enough, but she 
was a coaster, trading small goods from port to port, and it might take her a month to work clear round 
the southeast coast of the Great Island to the King�s City 
That was all right with him, Alder said. For if he dreaded the voyage, he feared its ending more. 
New moon to half moon, the sea voyage was a time of 
peace for him. The grey kitten was a hardy traveler; busy mousing the ship all day but faithfl.illy curling 
up under his chin or within hand�s reach at night; and to his unceasing wonder; that little scrap of warm 
life kept him from the wall of stones and the voices calling him across it. Not wholly. Not so that he ever 
entirely forgot them. They were there, just through the veil of sleep in darkness, just through the 
brightness of the day. Sleeping out on deck those warm nights, he opened his eyes often to see that the 
stars moved, swinging to the rocking of the moored ship, following their courses through heaven to the 
west. He was still a haunted man. But for a half month of summer along the coasts of Kameber and 
Barnisk and the Great Island he could turn his back on his ghosts. 
For days the kitten hunted a young rat nearly as big as it was. Seeing it proudly and laboriously hauling 
the carcass across the deck, one of the sailors called it Tug. Alder ac-cepted the name for it. 
They sailed down the Ebavnor Straits and in through the portals of Havnor Bay Across the sunlit water 
little by little the white towers of the city at the center of the world re-solved out of the haze of distance. 
Alder stood at the prow as they came in and looking up saw on the pinnacle of the highest tower a flash 

of silver light, the Sword of Erreth-Akbe. 
Now he wished he could stay aboard and sail on and not go ashore into the great city among great 
people with a let-ter for the king. He knew he was no fit messenger. Why had such a burden been laid on 
him? How could it be that a vii-lage sorcerer who knew nothing of high matters and deep 
arts was called on to make these journeys from land to land, from mage to monarch, from the living to 
the dead? 
He had said something like that to Sparrowhawk. �It�s all beyond me,� he had said. The old man looked 
at him a while and then, calling him by his true name, said, �The world�s vast and strange, Hara, but no 
vaster and no stranger than our minds are. Think of that sometimes. 
Behind the city the sky darkened with a thunderstorm inland. The towers burned white against purpleblack, 
and gulls soared like drifting sparks of fire above them. 
Pretty Rose was moored, the gangplank run out. This time the sailors wished him well as he shouldered 
his pack. He picked up the covered poultry basket in which Tug crouched patiently, and went ashore. 
The streets were many and crowded, but the way to the palace was plain, and he had no idea what to do 
except go there and say that he carried a letter for the king from the Archmage Sparrowhawk. 
And that he did, many times. 
From guard to guard, from official to official, from the broad outer steps of the palace to high 
anterooms, staircases with gilded banisters, inner offices with tapestried walls, across floors of tile and 
marble and oak, under ceilings cof-fered, beamed, vaulted, painted, he went repeating his talis-man: �I 
come from Sparrowhawk who was the Archmage with a letter for the king.� He would not give his letter 
up. A retinue, a crowd of suspicious, semi-civil, patronising, tem-porising, obstructive guards and ushers 
and officials kept gathering and thickening around him and followed and im-peded his slow way into the 
palace. 
Suddenly they were all gone. A door had opened. It closed behind him. 
He stood alone in a quiet room. A wide window looked out over the roofs northwestward. The 
thundercloud had cleared and the broad grey summit of Mount Onn hovered above far hills. 
Another door opened. A man came in, dressed in black, about Alder�s age, quick moving, with a fine, 
strong face as smooth as bronze. He came straight to Alder: �Master Alder, I am Lebannen.� 
He put out his right hand to touch Alder�s hand, palm against palm, as the custom was in Ea and the 
Enlades. Alder responded automatically to the familiar gesture. Then he thought he ought to kneel, or 
bow at least, but the mo-ment to do so seemed to have passed. He stood dumb. 
�You came from my Lord Sparrowhawk? How is he? Is he well?� 
�Yes, lord. He sends you-� Alder hurriedly groped in-side his jacket for the letter, which he had intended 
to offer to the king kneeling, when they finally showed him to the throne room where the king would be 
sitting on his throne -�this letter, my lord.� 
The eyes watching him were alert, urbane, as implacably keen as Sparrowhawk�s, but withholding even 
more of the mind within. As the king took the letter Alder offered him, his courtesy was perfect. �The 
bearer of any word from him has my heart�s thanks and welcome. Will you forgive me?� 
Alder finally managed a bow. The king walked over to the window to read the letter. 
He read it twice at least, then refolded it. His face was as 
impassive as before. He went to the door and spoke to some-one outside it, then turned back to Alder. 
�Please,� he said, �sit down with me. They�ll bring us something to eat. You�ve been all afternoon in the 
palace, I know. If the gate captain had had the wits to send me word, I could have spared you hours of 

climbing the walls and swimming the moats they set around me... Did you stay with my Lord 
Sparrowhawk? In his house on the cliff�s edge?� 
�Yes.� 
�I envy you. I�ve never been there. I haven�t seen him since we parted on Roke, half my lifetime ago. He 
wouldn�t let me come to him on Gont. He wouldn�t come to my crowning.� Lebannen smiled as if 
nothing he said was of any moment. �He gave me my kingdom,� he said. 
Sitting down, he nodded to Alder to take the chair fac-ing him across a little table. Alder looked at the 
tabletop, in-laid with curling patterns of ivory and silver, leaves and blossoms of the rowan tree twined 
about slender swords. 
�Did you have a good voyage?� the king asked, and made other small talk while they were served plates 
of cold meat and smoked trout and lettuces and cheese. He set Alder a welcome example by eating with 
a good appetite; and he poured them wine, the palest topaz, in goblets of crystal. He raised his glass. �To 
my lord and dear friend,� he said. 
Alder murmured, �To him,� and drank. 
The king spoke about Taon, which he had visited a few years before-Alder remembered the excitement 
of the is-land when the king was in Meoni. And he spoke of some musicians from Taon who were in the 
city now, harpers and singers come to make music for the court; it might be Alder knew some of them; 
and indeed the names he said were fa-miliar. He was very skilled at putting his guest at ease, and food 
and wine were a considerable help too. 
When they were done eating, the king poured them an-other half glass of wine and said, �The letter 
concerns you, mostly. Did you know that?� His tone had not changed much from the small talk, and 
Alder was fiddled for a moment. 
�No, he said. 
�Do you have an idea what it deals with?� 
�What I dream, maybe,� Alder said, speaking low, look-ing down. 
The king studied him for a moment. There was nothing offensive in his gaze, but he was more open in 
that scrutiny than most men would have been. Then he took up the letter and held it out to Alder. 
�My lord, I read very little.� 
Lebannen was not surprised-some sorcerers could read, some could not-but he clearly and sharply 
regretted putting his guest at a disadvantage. The gold-bronze skin of his face went dusky red. He said, 
�I�m sorry, Alder. May I read you what he says?� 
�Please, my lord,� Alder said. The king�s embarrassment made him, for a moment, feel the king�s equal, 
and he spoke for the first time naturally and with warmth. 
Lebannen scanned the salutation and some lines of the letter and then read aloud: 
�Alder of Taon who bears this to you is one called in dream and not by his own will to that land you and 
I crossed once together. He will tell you of suffering where suffering is past and change where no thing 
changes. We closed the door 
Cob opened. Now the wall itself maybe is to fall. He has been to Roke. Only Azver heard him. My Lord 
the King will hear and will act as wisdom instructs and need requires. Alder bears my lifelong honor and 
obedience to my Lord the King. Also my lifelong honor and regard to my lady Tenar. Also to my 
beloved daughter Tehanu a spoken message from me.� And he signs it with the rune of the Talon.� 
Lebannen looked up from the letter into Alder�s eyes and held his gaze. �Tell me what it is you dream,� 
he said. 

So once more Alder told his story. 
He told it briefly and not very well. Though he had been in awe of Sparrowhawk, the ex-Archmage 
looked and dressed and lived like an old villager or farmer, a man of Alder�s own kind and standing, and 
that simplicity had defeated all su-perficial timidity. But however kind and courteous the king might be, 
he looked like the king, he behaved like the king, he was the king, and to Alder the distance was 
insuperable. He hurried through as best he could and stopped with relief 
Lebannen asked a few questions. Lily and then Gannet had each touched Alder once: never since? And 
Gannet�s touch had burned? 
Alder held out his hand. The marks were almost invisible under a month�s tan. 
�I think the people at the wall would touch me if I came close to them,� he said. 
�But you keep away from them?� 
�I have done so.� 
�And they are not people you knew in life?� 
�Sometimes I think I know one or another.� 
�But never your wife?� 
�There are so many of them, my lord. Sometimes I think she�s there. But I can�t see hen� 
To talk about it brought it near, too near. He felt the fear welling up in him again. He thought the walls 
of the room might melt away and the evening sky and the floating mountain-crown vanish like a curtain 
brushed aside, to leave him standing where he was always standing, on a dark hill by a wall of stones. 
�Alden� 
He looked up, shaken, his head swimming. The room seemed bright, the king�s face hard and vivid 
�You�ll stay here in the palace?� 
It was an invitation, but Alder could only nod, accepting it as an orden 
�Good. I�ll arrange for you to give the message you bear to Mistress Tehanu tomorrow. And I know the 
White Lady will wish to talk with you. 
He bowed. Lebannen turned away �My lord-� 
Lebannen turned. 
�May I have my cat with me?� 
Not a flicker of a smile, no mockery. �Of course.� 
�My lord, I am sorry to my heart to bring news that troubles you!� 
�Any word from the man who sent you is a grace to me and to its bearer. And I�d rather get bad news 
from an hon-est man than lies from a flatterer,� Lebannen said, and Aide; hearing the true accent of his 
home islands in the words, was a little cheered. 
The king went out, and at once a man looked in the door 
Alder had entered by �I will take you to your chamber, if you will follow me, sir,� he said. He was 
dignified, elderly, and well dressed, and Alder followed him without any idea whether he was a 
nobleman or a servant, and therefore not daring to ask him about Tug. In the room before the room 
where he had met the king, the officials and guards and ush-ers had absolutely insisted that he leave his 
poultry basket with them. It had been eyed with suspicion and inspected with disapproval by ten or 
fifteen officials already. He had explained ten or fifteen times that he had the cat with him because he 
had nowhere in the city to leave it. The anteroom where he had been compelled to set it down was far 
behind him, he had not seen it there as they went through, he would never find it now, it was half a 
palace away, corridors, hall-ways, passages, doors... 

His guide bowed and left him in a small, beautiful room, tapestried, carpeted, a chair with an 
embroidered seat, a win-dow that looked out to the harbor, a table on which stood a bowl of summer 
fruit and a pitcher of waten And the poul-try basket. 
He opened it. Tug emerged in a leisurely manner indi-cating his familiarity with palaces. He stretched, 
sniffed Aider�s fingers in greeting, and went about the room exam-ining things. He discovered a 
curtained alcove with a bed in it and jumped up on the bed. A discreet knock at the door. A young man 
entered carrying a large, flat, heavy wooden box with no lid. He bowed to Alder, murmuring, �Sand, 
sin� He placed the box in the far corner of the alcove. He bowed again and left. 
�Well,� Aider said, sitting down on the bed. He was not in the habit of talking to the kitten. Their 
relationship was one of silent, trustful touch. But he had to talk to somebody. �I met the king today,� he 
said. 
THE KING HAD ALL Too MANY people to talk to before he could sit down on his bed. Chief among 
them were the emissaries of the High King of the Kargs. They were about to take their leave, having 
accomplished their mission to Havnor, to their own satisfaction if not at all to Lebannen�s. 
He had looked forward to the visit of these ambassadors as the culmination of years of patient overture, 
invitation, and negotiation. For the first ten years of his reign he had been able to accomplish nothing at 
all with the Kargs. The God-King in Awabath rejected his offers of treaties and trade and sent his envoys 
back unheard, declaring that gods do not parley with vile mortals, least of all with accursed sor-cerers. 
But the God-King�s proclamations of universal divine empire were not followed by the threatened fleets 
of a myr-iad ships bearing plumed warriors to overrun the godless West. Even the pirate raids that had 
plagued the eastern isles of the Archipelago for so long gradually ceased. The pirates had become 
contrabanders, seeking to trade whatever unli-censed goods they could smuggle out of Karego-At for 
Archipelagan iron and steel and bronze, for the Kargad Lands were poor in mines and metal. 
It was from these illicit traders that news first came of the rise of the High King. 
On Hur-at-Hur, the big, poor, easternmost island of the Kargad Lands, a warlord, Thol, claiming descent 
from Thoreg of Hupun and from the God Wuluah, had made 
himself High King of that land. Next he had conquered At-nini, and then, with a fleet and an invading 
army drawn from both Hur-at-Hur and Atnini, he had claimed dominion over the rich central island, 
Karego-At. While his warriors were fighting their way towards Awabath, the capital city the people of 
the city rose up against the tyranny of the God- King. They slaughtered the high priests, drove the 
bureau-crats out of the temples, threw the gates wide, and welcomed King Thol to the throne of Thoreg 
with banners and danc-ing in the streets. 
The God-King fled with a remnant of his guards and hi-erophants to the Place of the Tombs on Atuan. 
There in the desert, in his temple by the earthquake-shattered ruins of the shrine of the Nameless Ones, 
one of his priest-eunuchs cut the God-King�s throat. 
Thol proclaimed himself High King of the Four Kargad Lands. As soon as he got word of that, 
Lebannen sent am-bassadors to greet his brother king and assure him of the friendly disposition of the 
Archipelago. 
Five years of difficult and tiresome diplomacy had en-sued. Thol was a violent man on a threatened 
throne. In the wreckage of the theocracy, all control in his realm was chancy, all authority questionable. 
Lesser kings constantly declared themselves and had to be bought or beaten into obedience to the High 
King. Sectarians issued from shrines and caverns crying �Woe to the mighty!� and foretelling 

earthquake, tidal wave, plague upon the deicides. Ruling a troubled, divided empire, Thol could scarcely 
place any trust in the powerful and wealthy Archipelagans. 
It meant nothing to him that their king talked about friendship, flourishing the Ring of Peace. Did not the 
Kargs have a claim to that ring? It had been made in ancient days in the West, but long ago, King 
Thoreg of Hupun had accepted it as a gift from the hero Erreth-Akbe, a sign of amity be-tween the 
Kargad and Hardic lands. It had disappeared, and there had been war, not amity. But then the Hawk- 
Mage had found the ring and stolen it back, along with the Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, and carried 
both off to Havnon So much for the trustworthiness of the Archipelagans. 
Through his envoys, Lebannen patiently and politely pointed out that the Ring of Peace had, to begin 
with, been Morred�s gift to Elfarran, a cherished token of the Archipel-ago�s most beloved king and 
queen. And a very sacred thing as well, for on it was the Bond rune, a mighty enchantment of blessing. 
Nearly four centuries ago, Erreth-Akbe had taken it to the Kargad Lands as a pledge of unbreakable 
peace. But the priests of Awabath had broken the pledge, and broken the Ring. Some forty years ago 
now, Spar-rowhawk of Roke and Tenar of Atuan had healed the Ring. What, then, of the peace? 
That had been the gist of his messages to King Thol. 
And a month ago, just after the Long Dance of summer, a fleet of ships had come sailing straight down 
the Passage of Felkway, up the Ebavnor Straits, and in between the portals of Havnor Bay: long red 
ships with red sails, carrying plumed warriors, gorgeous-robed emissaries, and a few veiled women. 
�Let the daughter of Thol the High King, who sits upon the Throne of Thoreg and whose ancestor was 
Wuluah, wear the Ring of Peace upon her arm, as Queen Elfarran of 
Sol�a wore it, and this will be the sign of everlasting peace between the Western and the Eastern Isles.� 
That was the High King�s message to Lebannen. It was written out in big Hardic runes on a scroll, but 
before hand-ing it to King Lebannen, Thol�s ambassador read it out loud, in public, at the reception of 
the emissaries at the court in Havnor, with the whole court there to do the Kargish envoys honor. 
Perhaps it was because the ambassador did not actu-ally read Hardic, but spoke the words loudly and 
slowly from memory, that they had the tone of an ultimatum. 
The princess said nothing. She stood among the ten handmaidens or slave girls who had accompanied 
her to Havnor and the flock of court ladies who had been hastily assigned to look after her and do her 
honor. She was veiled, entirely veiled, as was, it appeared, the custom of well-born women in Hur-at- 
Hur. The veils, red with lines of gold em-broidery, fell straight down from a flat-brimmed hat or 
headdress, so that the princess appeared to be a red column or pillar, cylindrical, featureless, motionless, 
silent. 
�The High King Thol does us great honor,� Lebannen said in his clear, quiet voice; and then he paused. 
The court and the emissaries waited. �You are welcome here, princess,� he said to the veiled figure. It 
did not stir. 
�Let the princess be lodged in the River House, and let all be as she desires,� Lebannen said. 
The River House was a beautifiil small palace at the northern edge of the city, fitted into the old city 
wall, with terraces built out over the little River Serrenen. Queen Heru had built it, and it was often 
called the Queen�s House. 
When Lebannen came to the throne he had had it repaired and refurnished, along with the Palace of 
Maharion, called the New Palace, in which he held court. He used the River House only for summer 
festivities and sometimes as a retreat for himself for a few days. 
Alittle rustle now went through his courtiers. The Queen�s House? 

After urbanities among the Kargish emissaries, Leban-nen left the audience room. He went to his 
dressing room, where he could be as alone as a king can be, with his old ser-vant, Oak, whom he had 
known all his life. 
He slapped the gilded scroll down on a table. �Cheese in a rat trap,� he said. He was shaking. He 
whipped the dagger he always wore out of its sheath and stabbed it straight down through the High 
King�s message. �A pig in a poke,� he said. �A piece of goods. The Ring on her arm and the collar round 
my neck.� 
Oak stared at him in blank dismay. Prince Arren of Enlad had never lost his temper. When he was a 
child he might have wept for a moment, one bitter sob, but that was all. He was too well trained, too well 
disciplined to give way to anger. And as king, a king who had earned his realm by crossing the land of 
the dead, he could be stern, but always, Oak thought, too proud, too strong for anger. 
�They will not use me!� Lebannen said, stabbing the dagger down again, his face so black and blind 
with fury that the old man drew back from him in real fear. 
Lebannen saw him. He always saw the people around him. 
He sheathed his dagger. He said in a steadier voice, �Oak, by my name, I will destroy Thol and his 
kingdom before 
I let him use me as a footstool to his throne.� Then he drew a long breath and sat down to let Oak 
lift the heavy gold-weighted state robe from his shoulders. 
Oak never breathed a word of this scene to anyone, but there was, of course, immediate and continuous 
speculation about the princess of the Kargs and what the king was going to do about her-or what, in fact, 
he had already done. 
He had not said that he accepted the offer of the princess as his bride. For all agreed she had been 
offered to him as his bride; the language about Elfarran�s Ring barely veiled the offer, or the bargain, or 
the threat. But he had not refused it, either. His response (endlessly analyzed) had been to say she was 
welcome, that all should be as she desired, and that she should live in the River House: the Queen�s 
House. Surely that was significant? But on the other hand, why not in the New Palace? Why send her 
across the city? 
Ever since Lebannen�s coronation, ladies of noble houses and princesses of the old royal lineages of 
Enlad, Ea, and Shelieth had come to visit or to stay at the court. They had all been entertained most 
royally, and the king had danced at their weddings as, one by one, they sealed for noblemen or wealthy 
commoners. It was well known that he liked the company of women and their counsel as well, that he 
would willingly flirt with a pretty girl and invite an intelligent woman to advise him, tease him, or 
console him. But no girl or woman had ever come near the rumor of a shadow of a chance of marrying 
him. And none had ever been lodged in the River House. 
The king must have a queen, his advisors told him at regular intervals. 
You really must marry; Arren, his mother had told him the last time he saw her alive. 
The heir of Morred, will he have no heir? asked the com-mon people. 
To all of them he had said, in various words and ways: 
Give me time. I have the ruins of a kingdom to rebuild. Let me make a house worthy of a queen, a realm 
my child can nile. And because he was well loved and trusted, and still a young man, and for all his 
gravity a charming and persuasive one, he had escaped all the hopeful maidens. Until now. 
What was under the stiff red veils? Who lived inside that unrevealing tent? The ladies assigned to the 
princess s en-tourage were besieged by questions. Was she pretty? Ugly? Was it true she was tall and 

thin, short and muscular, white as milk, pockmarked, one-eyed, yellow-haired, black-haired, forty-five 
years old, ten years old, a drooling cretin, a brilliant beauty? 
Gradually the rumors began to run one way. She was young, though not a child; hair neither yellow nor 
black; pretty enough, said some of the ladies; coarse, said others. Spoke not a word of Hardic, they all 
said, and would not learn. Hid among her women, and when forced to leave her room, hid in her red tentveils. 
The king had paid her a visit of courtesy. She had not bowed to him, or spoken, or made any sign, 
but stood there, said old Lady Iyesa in exaspera-tion, �like a brick chimney.� 
He spoke to her through men who had served as his en-voys in the Kargad Lands and through the Karg 
ambassador, who spoke fairly good Hardic. Laboriously he transmitted his 
compliments and queries as to her wishes and desires. The translators spoke to her women, whose veils 
were shorter and somewhat less impenetrable. Her women gathered round the motionless red pillar and 
mumbled and buzzed and returned to the translators, and the translators informed the king that the 
princess was content and required nothing. 
She had been there a half month when Tenar and Tehanu arrived from Gont. Lebannen had sent a ship 
and a message begging them to come, shortly before the Kargad fleet brought the princess, and for 
reasons that had nothing to do with her or King Thol. But the first time he was alone with Tenar, he 
burst out, �What am I going to do with her? What can I do?� 
�Tell me about it,� Tenar said, looking somewhat amazed. 
Lebannen had spent only a brief time with Tenar, though they had written a few letters over the years; he 
was not yet used to her hair being grey, and she seemed smaller than he remembered her; but with her he 
felt immediately, as he had fifteen years earlier, that he could say anything and she would understand. 
�For five years I�ve built up trade and tried to keep on good terms with Thol, because he�s a warlord and 
I don�t want my kingdom pinched, as it was in Maharion�s reign, be-tween dragons in the west and 
warlords in the east. And be-cause I rule in the Sign of Peace. And it went well enough, till this. Till he 
sends this girl out of the blue, saying if you want peace, give her Elfarran�s Ring. Your Ring, Tenar! 
Yours and Ged�s!� 
Tenar hesitated a while. �She is his daughter, after all.� 
�What�s a daughter to a barbarian king? Goods. A bar-gaining piece to buy advantage with. You know 
that! You were born there!� 
It was unlike him to speak so, and he heard it himself He knelt down suddenly, catching her hand and 
putting it over his eyes in sign of contrition. �Tenar, I�m sorry This disturbs me beyond all reason. I 
can�t see what to do.� 
�Well, so long as you do nothing, you have some lee-way.. . Maybe the princess has some opinion of her 
own?� 
�How can she? Hidden in that red sack? She won�t talk, she won�t look out, she might as well be a tent 
pole.� He tried to laugh. His own uncontrollable resentment alarmed him and he tried to excuse it. �This 
came on just as I had trou-bling news from the west. It was for that that I asked you and Tehanu to 
come. Not to bother you with this foolishness.� 
�It isn�t foolishness,� Tenar said, but he brushed the topic away, dismissed it, and began to talk about 
dragons. 
Since the news from the west had been troubling indeed, he had succeeded in not thinking about the 
princess at all, most of the time. He was aware that it was not his habit to handle matters of state by 
ignoring them. Manipulated, one manipulates others. Several days after their conversation, he asked 

Tenar to visit the princess, to try to get her to talk. After all, he said, they spoke the same language. 
�Probably,� Tenar said. �I never knew anybody from Hur-at-Hur. On Atuan, we called them barbarians.� 
He was chastised. But of course she did what he asked. Presently she reported that she and the princess 
spoke the same language, or nearly the same, and that the princess had 
not known that there were any other languages. She had thought all the people here, the courtiers and 
ladies, were ma-licious lunatics, mocking her by chattering and yapping like animals without human 
speech. As well as Tenar could tell, she had grown up in the desert, in King Thol�s original do-main on 
Hur-at-Hur, and had only been very briefly at the imperial court in Awabath before she was sent on to 
Havnor. 
�She�s frightened,� Tenar said. 
�So she hides in her tent. What does she think I am?� 
�How could she know what you are?� 
He scowled. �How old is she?� 
�Young. But a woman. 
�I can�t marry her,� he said, with sudden resolution. �I�ll send her back� 
�A returned bride is a dishonored woman. If you send her back, Thol might kill her to keep the dishonor 
from his house. He�ll certainly consider that you intend to dishonor him.� 
The look of ftiry came into his face again. 
Tenar forestalled him. �Barbarian customs,� she said stiffly. 
He strode up and down the room. �Very well. But I will not consider this girl as queen of the Kingdom 
of Morred. Can she be taught to speak Hardic? A few words, at least? Is she unteachable? I�ll tell Thol 
that a Hardic king can�t marry a woman who doesn�t speak the language of the realm. I don�t care if he 
doesn�t like it, he needs the slap. And it buys me time.� 
�And you�ll ask her to learn Hardic?� 
�How can I ask her anything if she takes it all for gibber-ish? What possible use is there in my going to 
her? I thought perhaps you�d speak to her, Tenar... You must see what an imposition this is, using this 
girl to make Thol appear my equal, using the Ring-the Ring you brought us-as a trap! I cannot even 
seem to condone it. I�m willing to temporise, to delay, in order to keep the peace. Nothing more. Even 
that much deceit is vile. Tell the girl what you think best. I will have nothing to do with hen� 
And he went out in a righteous wrath, which cooled slowly into an uneasy feeling much resembling 
shame. 
When the Kargish emissaries announced they would be leaving soon, Lebannen prepared a carefully 
worded message for King Thol. He expressed his appreciation of the honor of the princess�s presence in 
Havnor and the pleasure he and his court would have in introducing her to the manners, customs, and 
language of his kingdom. He said nothing at all about the Ring, about marrying her; or about not 
marrying hen 
It was in the evening after his conversation with the dream-troubled sorcerer from Taon that he met for 
the last time with the Kargs and gave them his letter to the High King. He read it aloud first, as the 
ambassador had read aloud Thol�s letter to him. 
The ambassador listened complacently. �The High King will be pleased,� he said. 
All the time he was talking amenities to the emissaries and displaying the gifts he was sending to Thol, 
Lebannen puzzled over this easy acceptance of his evasiveness. His thoughts all came to one conclusion: 
He knows I�m stuck with hen To which his mind made a passionate silent an-swer: Neven 

He inquired whether the ambassador would be going by the River House to bid his princess farewell. 
The ambassador 
looked at him blankly, as if he had been asked if he was going to say goodbye to a package he had 
delivered. Leban-nen felt the anger rising in his heart again. He saw the am-bassador�s face change a 
little, taking on a wary, placating look. He smiled and wished the emissaries a fair wind to the Kargad 
Lands. He went out of the audience chamber and to his own room. 
Rites and ceremony hedged most of his acts, and as king he must be in public most of his life; but 
because he had come to a throne empty for centuries, a palace where there were no protocols, he had 
been able to have some things as he liked them. He had kept ceremony out of his bedroom. His nights 
were his own. He said good night to Oak, who would sleep in the anteroom, and shut the doon He sat 
down on his bed. He felt tired and angry and strangely desolate. 
Around his neck he always wore a slight gold chain with a little pouch of cloth-of-gold on it. In the 
pouch was a pebble: a dull, black bit of rock, rough edged. He took it out arid held it in his hand as he 
sat and thought. 
He tried to turn his mind away from all this stupidity about the Kargish girl by thinking about the 
sorcerer Alder and his dreams. But all that came into his mind was a painfiil envy of Alder for having 
gone ashore on Gont, having talked with Ged, having stayed with him. 
That was why he felt desolate. The man he called his lord, the man he had loved above all others, 
wouldn�t let him come near; wouldn�t come to him. 
Did Ged believe that because he had lost his wizardly power, Lebannen must think less of him? must 
despise him? 
Given the power that power had over the minds and hearts of men, it was not an implausible thought. 
But surely Ged knew him better, or at least thought better of him. 
Was it that, having been truly Lebannen�s lord and guide, Ged could not bear to be his subject? That 
might indeed be hard for the old man to bear: the blunt, irrevocable reversal of their status. 
But Lebannen remembered very clearly how Ged had knelt to him, down on both knees, on Roke Knoll, 
in the shadow of the dragon and in the sight of the masters whose master Ged had been. He had stood up 
and kissed Leban-nen, telling him to rule well, calling him my lord and dear companion. 
�He gave me my kingdom,� Lebannen had said to Alden That had been the moment he gave it. Wholly, 
freely. 
And that was why Ged wouldn�t come to Havnor, wouldn�t let Lebannen come to take counsel with him. 
He had handed over the power-wholly, freely. He would not even seem to meddle, to cast his shadow 
across Lebannen�s light. 
�He has done with doing,� the Doorkeeper had said. 
But Alder�s story had moved Ged to send the man here, to Lebannen, asking him to act as need required. 
It was indeed strange, Alder�s story; and Ged�s saying that maybe the wall itself was going to fall was 
stranger yet. What could it mean? And why should one man�s dreams bear so much weight? 
He himself had dreamed of the outskirts of the dry land, long ago, when he and Ged the Archmage were 
traveling to-gether, before they ever came to Selidor. 
And on that westernmost of all the islands he had followed 
Ged into the dry land. Across the wall of stones. Down to dim cities where the shadows of the 
dead stood in doorways or walked without aim or purpose in streets lit only by the moveless stars. With 
Ged he had walked across all that country a weary way to a dark valley of dust and stones at the foot of 

the mountains whose only name was Pain. 
He opened his palm, looked down at the little black stone he held, closed his hand on it again. 
From the valley of the dry river, having done what they came to do, they had climbed up into the 
mountains, be-cause there was no turning back. They had gone up the road forbidden to the dead, 
climbing, clambering over rocks that scored and burned their hands, till Ged could go no farther. 
Lebannen had carried him as far as he could, then crawled on with him to the end of darkness, the 
hopeless cliff of night. And so had come back, with him, into the sunlight and the sound of the sea 
breaking on the shores of life. 
It was a long time since he had thought so vividly of that terrible journey. But the bit of black stone from 
those moun-tains was always over his heart. 
And it seemed to him now that the memory of that land, the darkness of it, the dust, was always in his 
mind just under the bright various play and movement of the days, although he always looked away 
from it. He looked away because he could not bear the knowledge that in the end that was where he 
would come again: come alone, uncompanioned, and for-ever. To stand empty-eyed, unspeaking, in the 
shadows of a shadow city Never to see sunlight, or drink water, or touch a living hand. 
He got up abruptly, shaking off these morbid thoughts. 
He closed the stone in its pouch, made ready for bed, put out the lamp, and lay down. At once he saw it 
again: the dim grey land of dust and rock. It rose up far ahead into black, sharp peaks, but here it sloped 
away, always downward, to the right, into utter darkness. �What lies that way?� he had asked Ged as 
they walked on and on. His companion had said he did not know, that maybe that way there was no end. 
Lebannen sat up, angered and alarmed by the relentless drift of his thought. His eyes sought the window. 
It looked north. He liked the view from Havnor across the hills to the tall, grey-headed mountain Onn. 
Farther north, unseen, across all the width of the Great Island and the Sea of Ea, was Enlad, his home. 
Lying in bed he could see only the sky, a clear summer night sky the Heart of the Swan riding high 
among lesser stars. His kingdom. The kingdom of light, of life, where the stars blossomed like white 
flowers in the east and drooped in their brightness to the west. He would not think of that other realm 
where the stars stayed still, where there was no power in a man�s hand, and no right way to go because 
no way led anpvhere. 
Lying gazing at the stars, he turned his mind deliberately from those memories and from the thought of 
Ged. He thought of Tenar: the sound of her voice, the touch of her hand. Courtiers were ceremonious, 
cautious about how and when they touched the king. She was not. She laid her hand on his, laughing. 
She was bolder with him than his mother had been. 
Rose, princess of the House of Enlad, had died of a fever two years ago, while he was on shipboard 
coming to make a 
royal visit to Berila on Enlad and the isles south of it. He had not known of her death till he came home 
to a city and a house in mourning. 
His mother was there now in the dark country the dry country If he came there and passed her in the 
street she would not look at him. She would not speak to him. 
He clenched his hands. He rearranged the cushions of his bed, tried to make himself easy, tried to set his 
mind away from there, to think of things that would keep him from going back there. To think of his 
mother living, her voice, her dark eyes under dark arched brows, her delicate hands. 
Or to think of Tenar. He knew he had asked Tenar to come to Havnor not only to take counsel from her 
but be-cause she was the mother that remained to him. He wanted that love, to give it and be given it. 

The mthless love that makes no allowances, no conditions. Tenar�s eyes were grey, not dark, but she 
looked right through him with a piercing tenderness undeceived by anything he said or did. 
He knew he did well what he had been called to do. He knew he was good at playing king. But only with 
his mother and with Tenar had he ever known beyond any self-doubt what it was to be king. 
TENAR HAD KNOWN HIM since he was a very young man, not yet crowned. She had loved him then 
and ever since, for his sake, for Ged�s sake, and for her own. He was to her the son who never breaks 
your heart. 
But she thought he might yet manage to, if he kept on being so ragefiil and dishonest about this poor girl 
from Hur-at-Hur. 
She attended the final audience of the emissaries from Awabath. Lebannen had asked her to be there, 
and she was glad to come. Finding Kargs at the court when she came there at the beginning of summer, 
she had expected them to shun her or at least to eye her askance: the renegade priestess who with the 
thieving Hawk Mage had stolen the Ring of Erreth-Alcbe from the treasury of the Tombs of Atuan and 
traitorously fled with it to Havnos It was her doing that the Archipelago had a king again. The Kargs 
might well hold it against her. 
And Thol of Hur-at-Hur had restored the worship of the Twin Gods and the Nameless Ones, whose 
greatest temple Tenar had despoiled. Her treason had been not only political but religious. 
Yet that was long ago, forty years and more, almost the stuff of legend; and statesmen remember things 
selectively. Thol�s ambassador had begged the honor of an audience with her and had greeted her with 
elaborately pious respect, some of which she thought was real. He called her Lady Arha, the Eaten One, 
the One Ever Reborn. She had not been called by those names for years, and they sounded very strange 
to her. But it gave her a keen, ruefiil pleasure to hear her native tongue and to find she could still speak it. 
So she came to bid the ambassador and his company goodbye. She asked him to assure the High King of 
the Kargs that his daughter was well, and she looked admiringly a last time at the tall, rawboned men 
with their pale, braided hair, their plumed headdresses, their court armor of silver mesh interwoven with 
feathers. When she lived in the Kargad 
Lands she had seen few men of her own race. Only women and eunuchs had lived at the Place of the 
Tombs. 
After the ceremony she escaped into the gardens of the palace. The summer night was warm and 
restless, flowering shrubs of the gardens stirring in the night wind. The sounds of the city outside the 
palace walls were like the murmur of a quiet sea. A couple of young courtiers were walking en-twined 
under the arbors; not to disturb them, Tenar walked among the fountains and the roses at the other end of 
the garden. 
Lebannen had left the audience scowling again. What was wrong with him? So far as she knew, he had 
never before rebelled against the obligations of his position. Certainly he knew that a king must marry 
and has little real choice as to whom he marries. He knew that a king who does not obey his people is a 
tyrant. He knew his people wanted a queen, wanted heirs to the throne. But he had done nothing about it. 
Women of the court had been happy to gossip to Tenar about his several mistresses, none of whom had 
lost anything by being known as the king�s lover. He had certainly man-aged all that quite well, but he 
couldn�t expect to do so for-ever. Why was he so enraged by King Thol�s offering him a perfectly 
appropriate solution? 
Imperfectly appropriate, perhaps. The princess was some-thing of a problem. 

Tenar was going to have to try to teach the girl Hardic. And to find ladies willing to instruct her in the 
manners of the Archipelago and the etiquette of the court-some-thing she certainly wasn�t capable of 
herself She had more none of it frightened or worried hes She was simply home-sick. She wanted to be 
back on Gont, with Ged, in their house. 
She had come to Havnor because Lebannen sent for her and Tehanu, and Ged if he would come; but 
Ged wouldn�t come, and Tehanu wouldn�t come without her. That did frighten and worry her. Could her 
daughter not break free from her? It was Tehanu�s counsel Lebannen needed, not hers. But her daughter 
clung to her, as ill at ease, as out of place in the court of Havnor as the girl from Hur-at-Hur was, and 
like her, silent, in hiding. 
So Tenar must play nursemaid, tutor, and companion now to both of them, two scared girls who didn�t 
know how to take hold of their power, while she wanted no power on earth except the freedom to go 
home where she belonged and help Ged with the garden. 
She wished they could grow white roses like these, at home. Their scent was so sweet in the night air. 
But it was too windy on the Overfell, and the sun was too strong in summer. And probably the goats 
would eat the roses. 
She went back indoors at last and made her way through the eastern wing to the suite of rooms she 
shared with Tehanu. Her daughter was asleep, for it was late. A flame no bigger than a pearl burned on 
the wick of a tiny alabaster lamp. The high rooms were soft, shadowy She blew out the lamp, got into 
bed, and soon sank towards sleep. 
She was walking along a narrow, high-vaulted corridor of stone. She carried the alabaster lamp. Its faint 
oval of light died away into darkness in front of her and behind her. She came to the door of a room that 
opened off the corridor. Inside 
the room were people with the wings of birds. Some had the heads of birds, hawks and vultures. 
They stood or squat-ted motionless, not looking at her or at anything, with eyes encircled with white and 
red. Their wings were like huge black cloaks hanging down behind them. She knew they could not fly. 
They were so mournful, so hopeless, and the air in the room was so foul that she struggled to turn, to run 
away, but she could not move; and fighting that paralysis, she woke. 
There were the warm shadows, the stars in the windo~ the scent of roses, the soft stir of the city, 
Tehanu�s breathing as she slept. 
Tenar sat up to shake off the remnants of the dream. It had been of the Painted Room in the Labyrinth of 
the Tombs, where she had first met Ged face to face, forty years ago. In the dream the paintings on the 
walls had come to life. Only it was not life. It was the endless, timeless unlife of those who died without 
rebirth: those accursed by the Nameless Ones: infidels, westerners, sorcerers. 
After you died you were reborn. That was the sure knowledge in which she had been brought up. When 
as a child she was taken to the Tombs to be Arha, the Eaten One, they told her that she alone of all 
people had been and would be reborn as herself life after life. Sometimes she had believed that, but not 
always, even when she was the priest-ess of the Tombs, and never since. But she knew what all the 
people of the Kargad Lands knew, that when they died they would return in a new body, the lamp that 
guttered out flick-ering up again that same instant elsewhere, in a womans womb or the tiny egg of a 
minnow or a windborne seed of grass, coming back to be, forgetfiul of the old life, fresh for the new, life 
after life eternally. 
Only those outcast by the earth itself, by the Old Powers, the dark sorcerers of the Hardic Lands, were 
not reborn. When they died-so said the Kargs-they did not rejoin the living world, but went to a dreary 

place of half being where, winged but flightless, neither bird nor human, they must endure without hope. 
How the priestess Kossil had rel-ished telling her about the terrible fate of those boastful en-emies of the 
God-King, their souls doomed to be cast out of the world of light forever! 
But the afterlife Ged had told her of, where he said his people went, that changeless land of cold dust 
and shadow- was that any less dreary, any less terrible? 
Unanswerable questions clamored in her mind: because she was no longer a Karg, because she had 
betrayed the sa-cred place, must she go to that dry land when she died? Must Ged go there? Would they 
pass each other there, uncaring? That was not possible. But what if he must go there, and she be reborn, 
so that their parting must be eternal? 
She would not think about all that. It was clear enough why she had dreamed of the Painted Room, all 
these years after she had left all that behind her. It had to do with see-ing the ambassadors, speaking 
Kargish again, of course. But still she lay upset, unnerved by the dream. She did not want to go back to 
the nightmares of her youth. She wanted to be back in the house on the Overfell, lying by Ged, hearing 
Tehanu�s breath while she slept. When he slept Ged lay still as a stone; but the fire had left some 
damage in Tehanu�s throat so there was a little harshness always in her breathing, 
and Tenar had listened to that, listened for it, night after night, year after year. That was life, that was life 
returning, that dear sound, that slight harsh breath. 
Listening to it, she slept again at last. If she dreamed it was only of gulfs of air and the colors of morning 
moving in the sky. 
ALDER WOKE VERY EARLY. His little companion had been restless all night, and so had he. He was 
glad to get up and go to the window and sit sleepily watching light come into the sky over the harbor, 
fishing boats set out and the sails of ships loom from a low mist in the great bay, and listening to the 
hum and bustle of the city making ready for the day. About the time he began to wonder if he should 
venture into the bewilderment of the palace to find what he was supposed to do, there was a knock on 
his doon A man brought in a fray of fresh fruit and bread, a jug of milk, and a small bowl of meat for the 
kitten. �I will come to conduct you to the king�s presence when the fifth hour is told,� he informed Alder 
solemnly, and then rather less formally told him how to get down into the palace gardens if he wanted a 
walk. 
Alder knew of course that there were six hours from midnight to noon and six hours from noon to 
midnight, but had never heard the hours told, and wondered what the man meant. 
He learned, presently, that here in Havnor four trum-peters went out on the high balcony from which 
rose the highest tower of the palace, the one that was topped with the slender steel blade of the hero�s 
sword, and at the fourth and fifth hours before noon, and at noon, and at the first, second, and third hours 
after noon they blew their trumpets one to the west, one to the north, one to the east, one to the south. So 
the courtiers of the palace and the merchants and ship-pers of the city could arrange their doings and 
meet their ap-pointments at the hour agreed. A boy he met walking in the gardens explained all this, a 
small, thin boy in a tunic that was too long for him. He explained that the trumpeters knew when to blow 
their trumpets because there were great sand clocks in the tower, as well as the Pendulum of Ath which 
hung down from high up in the tower and if set swinging just at the hour would cease to swing just as 
the next hour began. And he told Alder that the tunes the trum-peters played were all parts of the Lament 
for Erreth-Akbe that King Maharion wrote when he came back from Selidor, a different part for each 
hour, but only at noon did they play the whole tune through. And if you wanted to be somewhere at a 

certain hour, you should keep an eye on the balconies, because the trumpeters always came out a few 
minutes early, and if the sun was shining they held up their silver trumpets to flash and shine. The boy 
was called Rody and he had come with his father, the Lord of Metama on Ark, to stay a year in Havnor, 
and he went to school in the palace, and he was nine, and he missed his mother and his sister. 
Alder was back in his room in time to meet his guide, less nervous than he might have been. The 
conversation with the child had reminded him that the sons of lords were chil-dren, that lords were men, 
and that it was not men he need fear. 
His guide brought him through the palace corridors to a long, light room with windows all along one 
wall, looking 
out over Havnor�s towers and fantastic bridges that arched over the canals and leapt from roof to roof 
and balcony to balcony across the streets. He half saw that panorama as he stood near the door, hesitant, 
not knowing if he should go forward to the group of people at the far end of the room. 
The king saw him and came to him, greeted him kindly, led him to the others, and introduced them one 
by one. 
There was a woman of fifty or so, small and very light- skinned, with greying hair and large grey eyes: 
Tenar, the king said smiling: Tenar of the Ring. She looked Alder in the eye and greeted him quietly. 
There was a man of about the king�s age, dressed in vel-vet and airy linens, with jewels on his belt and 
at his throat and a great ruby stud in his earlobe: Shipmaster Tosla, said the king. Tosla�s face, dark as 
old oak wood, was keen and hard. 
There was a middle-aged man, simply dressed, with a steady look that made Alder feel he could trust 
him: Prince Sege of the House of Havnor, said the king. 
There was a man of forty or so who carried a wooden staff of his own height, by which Alder knew him 
as a wvz-ard of the School on Roke. He had a rather worn face, fine hands, an aloof but courteous 
manner. Master Onyx, said the king. 
There was a woman whom Alder took for a servant be-cause she was very plainly dressed and stayed 
outside the group, turned half away as if looking out the windows. He saw the beautiful fall of her black 
hair, heavy and glossy as falling water, as Lebannen led her forward. �Tehanu of Gont,� the king said, 
and his voice rang out like a challenge. 
The woman looked straight at Alder for a moment. She was young; the left side of her face was smooth 
copper-rose, a dark bright eye under an arched eyebrow. The right side had been destroyed and was 
ridged, slabby scar, eyeless. Her right hand was like a raven�s curled claw. 
She put out her hand to Alder, in the manner of the people of Ea and the Enlades, as the others had done, 
but it was her left hand she held out. He touched his hand to hers, palm to palm. Hers was hot, fever hot. 
She looked at him again, an amazing glance from that one eye, bright, frown-ing, fierce. Then she 
looked down again and stood back as if she wished not to be one of them, wished not to be there. 
�Master Alder bears a message for you from your father the Hawk of Gont,� the king said, seeing the 
messenger stand wordless. 
Tehanu did not lift her head. The glossy black hair al-most hid the ruin of her face. 
�My lady,� Alder said, dry-mouthed and husky-voiced, �he bade me ask you two questions.� He paused, 
only be-cause he had to wet his lips and get his breath in a moment of panic that he had forgotten what 
he was to say; but the pause became a waiting silence. 
Tehanu said, in a voice hoarser than his, �Ask them.� 
�He said to ask first: Who are those who go to the dry land? And as I took my leave of him, he said, 

�Ask my daughter also: Will a dragon cross the wall of stones?�� 
Tehanu nodded her head in acknowledgment and stepped back a little more, as if to carry her riddles 
away with her, away from them. 
�The dry land,� the king said, �and the dragons.. 
His alert gaze went from face to face. 
�Come,� he said, �let�s sit and talk.� 
�Perhaps we could talk down in the gardens?� said the little grey-eyed woman, Tenar. The king agreed 
at once. Alder heard Tenar say to him as they went, �She finds it hard to be indoors all day. She wants 
the sky.� 
Gardeners brought chairs for them in the shade of a huge old willow beside one of the pools. Tehanu 
went to stand by the pool, gazing down into the green water where a few big silver carp swam lazily. 
Clearly she wanted to think over her father�s message, not to talk, though she could hear what they said. 
When the others were all settled, the king had Alder tell his story yet again. Their silence as they listened 
was com-passionate, and he was able to speak without constraint or hurry When he was done, they 
remained silent a while, and then the wizard Onyx asked him one question: �Did you dream last night?� 
Alder said he had had no dream he could recall. 
�I did,� Onyx said. �I dreamed of the Summoner who was my teacher in the School on Roke. They say 
of him that he died twice: because he came back from that country across the wall.� 
�I dreamed of the spirits that are not reborn,� Tenar said, very low. 
Prince Sege said, �All night I thought I heard voices down in the city streets, voices I knew from my 
childhood, calling as they used to do. But when I listened, it was only watchmen or drunken sailors 
shouting.� 
�I never dream,� said Tosla. 
�I didn�t dream of that country� the king said. �I remem-bered it. And couldn�t cease remembering it.� 
He looked at the silent woman, Tehanu, but she only looked down into the pond and did not speak. 
No one else spoke; and Alder could not stand it. �If I am a plague bringer, you must send me away!� he 
said. 
The wizard Onyx spoke, not imperiously but with final-ity �If Roke sent you to Gont, and Gont sent you 
to Havnor, Havnor is where you should be.� 
�Many heads make light thinking,� said Tosla, sardonic. 
Lebannen said, �Let�s put dreams aside for a while. Our guest needs to know what we were concerned 
about before he came-why I begged Tenar and Tehanu to come, earlier this summer, and summoned 
Tosla from his voyaging to take counsel with us. will you tell Alder of this matter, Tosla?� 
The dark-faced man nodded. The ruby in his ear gleamed like a drop of blood. 
�The matter is dragons,� he said. �In the �West Reach for some years now they�ve come to farms and 
villages on Ully and Usidero, flying low, seizing the roofs of houses with their talons, shaldng them, 
terril~ing the people. In the Toringates they�ve come twice now at harvest time and set the fields burning 
with their breath, and burnt haystacks and set the thatch of houses afire. They haven�t struck at people, 
but people have died in the fires. They haven�t attacked the houses of the lords of those islands, seeking 
after treasure, the way they did in the Dark Years, but only the villages and the fields. The same word 
came from a merchantman who�d been southwest as far as Sinily trading for grain: dragons had come 
and burnt the crop just as they were harvesting. 

�Then, last winter in Semel, two dragons settled on the summit of the volcano, Mount Andanden.� 
�fAh,� said Onyx, and at the king�s inquiring glance: �The wizard Seppel of Paln tells me that mountain 
was a most sa-cred place to the dragons, where they came to drink fire from the earth in ancient days.~~ 
�Well, they�re back,� said Tosla. �And they come down harrying the herds and flocks that are the wealth 
of the people there, not hurting the beasts but frightening them so they break loose and run wild. The 
people say they�re young dragons, black and thin, without much fire yet. 
�And in Pain, there are dragons living now in the moun-tains of the north part of the island, wild country 
without farms. Hunters used to go there to hunt mountain sheep and catch falcons to tame, but they�ve 
been driven out by the dragons, and no one goes near the mountains now. Maybe your Pelnish wizard 
knows about them?� 
Onyx nodded. �He says flights of them have been seen above the mountains like the ffights of wild 
geese.� 
�Between Pain and Semel, and the Island of Havnor, is only the width of the Pelnish Sea,� said Prince 
Sege. 
Alder was thinking that it was less than a hundred miles from Seine1 to his own island, Taon. 
�Tosla set out to the Dragons� Run in his ship the Tern,� the king said. 
�But got barely in sight of the easternmost of those isles before a swarm of the beasts came at me, Tosla 
said, with a hard grin. �They harried me as they do the cattle and sheep, swooping down to singe my 
sails, till I ran back where I came from. But that�s nothing new. 
Onyx nodded again. �Nobody but a dragorilord has ever sailed the Dragons� Run.� 
�I have,� the king said, and suddenly smiled a broad, boyish smile. �But I was with a dragonlord. . . 
Now that�s a time I�ve been thinking about. When I was in the West Reach with the Archmage, seeking 
Cob the necromancer, we passed Jessage, which lies even farther out than Simly, and we saw burned 
fields there. And in the Dragons� Run, we saw that they fought and killed one another like animals gone 
rabid.� 
After a time Prince Sege asked, �Could it be that some of those dragons did not recover from their 
madness in that evil time?� 
�It�s been fifteen years and more,� Onyx said. �But drag-ons live very long. Maybe time passes 
differently for them.� 
Alder noticed that as the wizard spoke he glanced at Tehanu, standing apart from them by the pool. 
�Yet only within the last year or two have they attacked people,� said the prince. 
�That they have not,� Tosla said. �If a dragon wanted to destroy the people of a farm or village, who�d 
stop it? They�ve been after people�s livelihood. Harvests, hayricks, farms, cattle. They�re saying, 
Begone -get out of the West!� 
�But why are they saying it with fire, with havoc?� the wizard demanded. �They can speak! They speak 
the Lan-guage of the Making. Morred and Erreth-Akbe talked with dragons. Our Archmage talked with 
them.� 
�Those we saw in the Dragons� Run,� the king said, �had lost the power of speech. The breach Cob had 
made in the world was drawing their power from them, as it did from us. 
96 
Only the great dragon Orm Embar came to us and spoke to the Archmage, telling him to go to 

Selidor.. .� He paused, his eyes far away. �And even from Orm Embar speech was taken, before he 
died.� Again he looked away from them, a strange light in his face. �It was for us Orm Embar died. He 
opened the way for us into the dark land.� 
They were all silent for a while. Tenar�s quiet voice broke the silence. �Once Sparrowhawk said to melet 
me see if I can remember how he said it: that the dragon and the dragon�s speech are one thing, one 
being. That a dragon does not learn the Old Speech, but is it.� 
�As a tern is flight. As a fish is swimming,� Onyx said slowly. �Yes.� 
Tehanu was listening, standing motionless by the pool. They all looked at her now. The look on her 
mother�s face was eager, urgent. Tehanu turned her head away. 
�How do you make a dragon talk to you?� the king said. He said it lightly, as if it were a pleasant% but 
it was followed by another silence. �Well,� he said, �that�s something I hope we can learn. Now, Master 
Onyx, while we�re speaking of dragons, will you tell us your story of the girl who came to the School on 
Roke, for none but me has heard it yet.� 
�A girl in the School!� said Tosla, with a scoffing grin. �Things have changed on Roke!� 
�Indeed they have,� the wizard said, with a long cool look at the sailor. �This was some eight years ago. 
She came from Way, disguised as a young man, wanting to study the art magic. Of course her poor 
disguise didn�t fool the Door-keeper. Yet he let her in, and he took her part. At that time, the School was 
headed by the Master Summoner-the man,� and he hesitated a moment, �the man of whom I told you I 
dreamed last night.� 
�Tell us something of that man, if you will, Master Onyx,� the king said. �That was Thorion, who 
returned from death?� 
�Yes. When the Archmage had been long gone and no word came, we feared he was dead. So the 
Summoner used his arts to go see if indeed he had crossed the wall. He stayed long there, so the masters 
feared for him too. But at last he woke, and said that the Archmage was there among the dead, and 
would not return himself but had bade Thorion return to govern Roke. Yet before long the dragon bore 
the Archmage Sparrowhawk living to us, with my lord Leban-nen... Then when the Archmage had 
departed again, the Summoner fell down and lay as if life had gone out of him. The Master Herbal, with 
all his art, believed him dead. Yet as we made ready to bury him, he moved, and spoke, saying he had 
come back to life to do what must be done. So, since we were not able to choose a new Archmage, 
Thorion the Summoner governed the School.� He paused. �When the girl came, though the Doorkeeper 
had admitted her, Tho-non would not have her within the walls. He would have nothing to do with hen 
But the Master Patterner took her to the Grove, and she lived there some while at the edge of the trees, 
and walked with him among them. He and the Door-keeper; and the Herbal, and Kurremkarmerruk the 
Namer, believed that there was a reason she had come to Roke, that she was a messenger or an agent of 
some great event, even if she herself didn�t know it; and so they protected hen The other masters 
followed Thorion, who said she brought only 
dissension and ruin and should be driven out. I was a student then. It was a sore trouble to us to know 
that our masters, masterless, were quarreling.� 
�And over a girl,� said Tosla. 
Onyx�s look at him this time was extremely cold. �Quite,� he said. After a minute he took up his story 
�To be brief, then, when Thorion sent a group of us to compel her to leave the island, she challenged 
him to meet her that evening on Roke Knoll. He came, and summoned her by her name to obey him: 
�Irian,� he called hen But she said, �I am not only Irian,� and speaking, she changed. She became-she 

took the form of a dragon. She touched Thorion and his body fell to dust. Then she climbed the hill, and 
watching her, we didrft know whether we saw a woman that burned like a fire, or a winged beast. But at 
the summit we saw her clearly, a dragon like a flame of red and gold. And she lifted up her wings and 
flew into the west. 
His voice had grown soft and his face was full of the re-membered awe. Nobody spoke. 
The wizard cleared his throat. �Before she went up the hill the Namer asked her, �Who are you?� She 
said she did not know her other name. The Patterner spoke to her; ask-ing where she would go and 
whether she would come back She said she was going beyond the west, to learn her name from her own 
people, but if he called her she would come.� 
In the silence, a hoarse, weak voice, like metal brushing on metal, spoke. Alder did not understand the 
words and yet they seemed familiar, as if he could almost remember what they meant. 
Tehanu had come close to the wizard and was standing by him, bending to him, tense as a drawn bow. It 
was she who had spoken. 
Startled and taken aback, the wizard stared up at her, got to his feet, backed off a step, and then 
controlling himself said, �Yes, those were her words: My people, beyond the west.� 
�Call her. Oh, call her,� Tehanu whispered, reaching out both her hands to him. Again he drew back 
involuntarily. 
Tenar stood up and murmured to her daughter, �What is it, what is it, Tehanu?� 
Tehanu stared round at them all. Alder felt as if he were a wraith she saw through. �Call her here,� she 
said. She looked at the king. �Can you call her?� 
�I have no such power. Perhaps the Patterner of Roke - perhaps you yourself-� 
Tehanu shook her head violently �No, no, no, no,� she whispered. �I am not like hen 1 have no wings.� 
Lebannen looked at Tenar as if for guidance. Tenar looked miserably at her daughten 
Tehanu turned round and faced the king. �I�m sorry,� she said, stiffly, in her weak, harsh voice. �I have 
to be alone, sit I will think about what my father said. I will try to answer what he asked. But I have to 
be alone, please.� 
Lebannen bowed to her and glanced at Tenar, who went at once to her daughter and put an arm about 
her; and they went away on the sunny path by the pools and fountains. 
The four men sat down again and said nothing for a few minutes. 
Lebannen said, �You were right, Onyx,� and to the oth-ers, �Master Onyx told me this tale of the 
woman-dragon 
Irian after I told him something about Tehanu. How as a child Tehanu summoned the dragon Kalessin to 
Gont, and spoke with the dragon in the Old Speech, and Kalessin called her daughten� 
�Sire, this is very strange, this is a strange time, when a dragon is a woman, and when an untaught girl 
speaks in the Language of the Making!� Onyx was deeply and obviously shaken, frightened. Alder saw 
that, and wondered why he himself felt no such fear. Probably, he thought, because he did not know 
enough to be afraid, or what to be afraid of 
�But there are old stories,� Tosla said. �Haven�t you heard them on Roke? Maybe your walls keep them 
out. They�re only tales simple people tell. Songs, even. There�s a sailors� song, �The Lass of Belilo,� that 
tells how a sailor left a pretty girl weeping in every port, until one of the pretty girls flew after his boat 
on wings of brass and snatched him out of it and ate him.� 
Onyx looked at Tosla with disgust. But Lebannen smiled and said, �The Woman of Kemay... The 
Archmage�s old master, Aihal, called Ogion, told Tenar about her. She was an old village woman, and 

lived as such. She invited Ogion into her cottage and served him fish soup. But she said mankind and 
dragonkind had once been one. She herself was a dragon as well as a woman. And being a mage, Ogion 
saw her as a dragon.� 
�As you saw Irian, Onyx,� said Lebannen. 
Speaking stiffly and addressing himself to the king only, Onyx said, �After Irian left Roke, the Master 
Namer showed us passages in the most ancient lore-books which had always been obscure, but which 
could be understood to speak of beings both human and dragon. And of a quarrel or great division 
among them. But none of this is clear to our understanding.� 
�I hoped that Tehanu might make it clear,� Lebannen said. His voice was even, so that Alder did not 
know whether he had given up or still held that hope. 
Aman was hurrying down the path to them, a grey- headed soldier of the king�s guards. Lebannen 
looked round, stood up, went to him. They conferred for a minute, low- voiced. The soldier strode off 
again; the king turned back to his companions. �Here is news,� he said, the ring of chal-lenge in his 
voice again. �Over the west of Havnor there have been great flights of dragons. They have set forests 
afire, and a coaster�s crew say people fleeing down to South Port told them the town of Resbel is 
burning.� 
THAT NIGHT THE KING�S swiftest ship carried him and his party across the Bay of Havnor running 
fast before the magewind Onyx raised. They came into the mouth of the Onneva River, under the 
shoulder of Mount Onn, at day-break. With them eleven horses were disembarked, fine, strong, slenderlegged 
creatures from the royal stables. Horses were rare on all the islands but Havnor and Semel. 
Tehanu knew donkeys well enough but had never seen a horse before. She had spent much of the night 
with them and their handlers, helping control and calm them. They were well-bred, mannerly horses but 
not used to sea voyages. 
When it came time to mount them, there on the sands of the Onneva, Onyx was fairly daunted, and had 
to be coached and encouraged by the handlers, but Tehanu was up in the 
102 
saddle as soon as the king. She put the reins in her crippled hand and did not use them, seeming to 
communicate with her mare by other means. 
So the little caravan set off due west into the foothills of the Falierns, keeping up a good pace. It was the 
swiftest way to travel that Lebannen had at his disposal; to coast clear round South Havnor would take 
too long. They had the wiz-ard Onyx with them to keep the weather favorable, clear the path of any 
obstacles, and defend them from any harm short of dragon fire. Against the dragons, if they encountered 
them, they had no defense at all, except perhaps Tehanu. 
Taking counsel the evening before with his advisors and the officers of his guard, Lebannen had quickly 
concluded that there was no way to fight the dragons or protect the towns and fields from them: arrows 
were useless, shields were useless. Only the greatest mages had ever been able to defeat a dragon. He 
had no such mage in his service and knew of none now living, but he must defend his people as best he 
could, and he knew no way to do it but to try to par-ley with the dragons. 
His majordomo had been shocked when he set off for the apartment where Tenar and Tehanu were: the 
king should send for those he wished to see, command them to come to him. �Not if he�s going to beg 
from them,� Leban-nen said. 

He told the startled maid who answered their door to ask if he might speak with the White Lady and the 
Woman of Gont. So they were known to the people of the palace and the city. That each bore her true 
name openly, as the king did, was so rare a matter, so defiant of rule and custom, of safety and propriety, 
that though people might know the name they were reluctant to say it and preferred to speak around it. 
He was admitted, and having told them briefly the news he had received, said, �Tehanu, it may be that 
you alone in my kingdom can help me. If you can call to these dragons as you called to Kalessin, if you 
have any power over them, if you can speak to them and ask why they war on my people, will you do 
so?� 
The young woman shrank from his words, turning to-wards her mother. 
But Tenar did not offer her any shelter. She stood un-moving. After a while she said, �Tehanu, long ago 
I told you: 
when a king speaks to you, you answer. You were a child then, and didn�t answer. You�re not a child 
now. 
Tehanu took a step back from them both. Like a child, she hung her head. �I can�t call to them,� she said 
in her faint, harsh voice. �I don�t know them.� 
�Can you call Kalessin?� Lebannen asked. 
She shook her head. �Too far away,� she whispered. �I don�t know where.� 
�But you are KalessiNs daughter,� Tenar said. �Can you not speak to these dragons?� 
She said wretchedly, �I don�t know.� 
Lebannen said, �If there is any chance, Tehanu, that they�ll talk to you, that you can talk to them, I beg 
you to take that chance. For I can�t fight them, and don�t know their language, and how can I find what 
they want of us from creatures who can destroy me with a breath, with a look? win you speak for me, for 
us?� 
She was silent. Then, so faintly he could barely hear it, she said, �Yes.� 
�Then make ready to travel with me. We leave by the fourth hour of the evening. My people will bring 
you to the ship. I thank you. And I thank you, Tenar!� he said, taking her hand a moment, but no longer, 
for he had much to see to before he went. 
When he came down to the what{ late and hurrying, there was the slender hooded figure. The last horse 
to be led aboard was snorting and bracing its feet, refining to go up the gangplank. Tehanu seemed to be 
conferring with the handler. Presently she took the horse�s bridle and talked to it a little, and they went 
up the gangplank quietly together. 
Ships are small, crowded houses; Lebannen heard two of the hostlers talking softly on the afterdeck 
towards mid-night. �She has the true hand,� one said, and the other, a younger voice, �Aye, she does, but 
she�s horrible to look at, ain�t she?� The first one said, �If a horse don�t mind it, why should you?� and 
the other, �I don�t know, but I do.� 
Now, as they rode from the Onneva sands into the foothills, where the way widened, Tosla brought his 
horse up beside Lebannen�s. �She�s to be our interpreter, is she?� he asked. 
�If she can. 
�Well, she�s braver than I�d have thought. If that hap-pened to her the first time she talked with a 
dragon, it�s likely to happen again.� 
�What do you mean?� 
�She was half burnt to death.� 
�Not by a dragon.� 

 �Who then?� 
�The people she was born to.� 
�How was that?� Tosla asked with a grimace. 
�Tramps, thieves. She was five or six years old. Whatever she did or they did, it ended in her being 
beaten unconscious and shoved into their campfire. Thinking, I suppose, she was dead or would die and 
it would be taken for an accident. They made off Villagers found her, and Tenar took her in.� 
Tosla scratched his ear. �There�s a pretty tale of human kindness. So she�s no daughter of the old 
Archmage either? But then what do they mean saying she�s a dragon�s get?� 
Lebannen had sailed with Tosla, had fought beside him years ago in the siege of Sorra, and knew him a 
brave, keen, coolheaded man. When Tosla�s coarseness chafed him he blamed his own thin skin. �I 
don�t know what they mean,� he answered mildly. �All I know is, the dragon called her daughter.� 
�That Roke wizard of yours, that Onyx, is quick to say he�s no use in this matter. But he can speak the 
Old Tongue, can�t he?� 
�Yes. He could wither you into ash with a few words of it. If he hasn�t it�s out of respect for me, not 
you, I think.� 
Tosla nodded. �I know that,� he said. 
They rode all that day at as quick a pace as the horses could keep, coming at nightfall to a little hill town 
where the horses could be fed and rested and the riders could sleep in variously uncomfortable beds. 
Those of them unused to rid-ing now discovered they could barely walk. The people there had heard 
nothing about dragons, and were overwhelmed only by the terror and glory of a whole party of rich 
strangers 
riding in and wanting oats and beds and paying for them with silver and gold. 
The riders set off again long before dawn. It was nearly a hundred miles from the sands of Onneva to 
Resbel. This second day would take them over the low pass of the Faliern Mountains and down the 
western side. Yenay, one of Leban-nen�s most trusted officers, rode well ahead of the others; Tosla was 
rear guard; Lebannen led the main group. He was jogging along half asleep in the dull quiet before dawn 
when hoofbeats coming towards him woke him. Yenay had come riding back. Lebannen looked up 
where the man was pointing. 
They had just emerged from woods on the crest of an open hillside and could see through the clear half 
light all the way to the pass. The mountains to either side of it massed black against the dull reddish 
glow of a cloudy dawn. 
But they were looking west. 
�That�s nearer than Resbel,� Yenay said. �Fifteen miles, maybe.� 
Tehanu�s mare, though small, was the finest of the lot, and had a strong conviction that she should lead 
the others. If Tehanu didn�t hold her back she would keep sidling and overtaking till she was ahead of 
the line. The mare came up at once when Lebannen reined in his big horse, and so Tehanu was beside 
him now looking where he looked. 
�The forest is burning,� he said to hen 
He could see only the scarred side of her face, so she seemed to gaze blindly; but she saw, and her claw 
hand that held the reins was trembling. The burned child fears the fire, he thought. 
�It called her Daughter of the Eldest,� the wizard whis-pered, as Tehanu stood motionless, watching the 
dragon go. 
She turned around, looking small and fragile in that great sweep of hill and forest in the grey dawn light. 

Leban-nen swung off his horse and hurried forward to hen He thought to find her drained and terrified, 
he put out his hand to help her walk, but she smiled at him. Her face, half ter-rible half beautiful, shone 
with the red light of the unrisen sun. 
Then he said that the Eldest, Kalessin, had gone with Orm Irian beyond the west to fly on the other 
wind. And he said the young dragons who remained here on the winds of the world say men are oath 
breakers who stole the dragons� lands. They tell one another that Kalessin will never return, and they 
will wait no longer, but will drive men out of all the western lands. But lately Orm Irian has returned, 
and is on Paln, he said. And I told him to ask her to come. And he said she would come to Kalessin�s 
daughter.� 
�They won�t strike again. They will wait in the moun-tains,� she said. 
Then indeed she looked around as if she did not know where she was, and when Lebannen took her arm 
she let him do so; but the fire and the smile lingered in her face, and she walked lightly. 
While the hostlers held the horses, already grazing on the dew-wet grass, Onyx, Tosla, and Yenay came 
round her, though they kept a respectful distance. Onyx said, �My Lady Tehanu, I have never seen so 
brave an act.� 
�Nor I,� Tosla said. 
�I was afraid,� Tehanu said, in her voice that carried no 
emotion. �But I called him brother, and he called me sister.� 
�I could not understand all you said,� the wizard said. �I 
have no such knowledge of the Old Speech as you. Will you 
tell us what passed between you?� 
She spoke slowly, her eyes on the west where the dragon had flown. The dull red of the distant fire was 
paling as the east grew bright. �I said, �Why are you burning the king�s is-land?� And he said, �It is time 
we have our own lands again.� And I said, �Did the Eldest bid you take them with fire?� 

CHAPTER III 
The Dragon Council 
FROM THE WINDOW OF HER room in the palace Tenar had watched the ship sail, carrying Lebannen 
and her daughter away into the night. She had not gone down to the wharf with Tehanu. It had been 
hard, very hard to reftise to come with her on this journey. Tehanu had begged, she who never asked for 
anything. She never cried, could not cry, but her breath had caught sobbing: �But I can�t go, I can�t go 
alone! Come with me, mother!� 
�My love, my heart, if I could spare you this fear I would, don�t you see I can�t? I�ve done what I could 
do for you, my flame of fire, my star. The king is right-only you, you alone, can do this.� 
�But if you were just there, so I knew you were there-� 
�I�m here, I�m always here. What could I do there but be a burden? You must travel fast, it will be a 
hard journey. I�d hold you back. And you might fear for me. You don�t need me. I�m no use to you. You 
must learn that. You must go, Tehanu.� 
And she had turned away from her child and begun sort-ing out the clothing Tehanu should take, home 
clothes, not the fancy things they wore here in the palace: her stout shoes, her good cloak. If she wept 
while she did it, she did not let her daughter see it. 
Tehanu stood as if bewildered, paralysed with fear. When Tenar gave her clothes to change into, she 
obeyed. When the king�s lieutenant, Yenay, knocked and asked if he might conduct Mistress Tehanu 
down to the wharf, she stared at him like a dumb animal. 
�Go now,� Tenar said. She embraced her and laid her hand on the great scar that was half her face. �You 
are Ka-lessin�s daughter as well as mine. 
The girl held her very tightly for a long moment, let go, turned away without a word, and followed 
Yenay out the door. 
Tenar stood feeling the chill of the night air where the heat of Tehanu�s body and arms had been. 
She went over to the window. Lights down on the dock, the coming and going of men, the hoof clatter of 
horses being led down the steep streets above the waten A tall ship was at the pier, a ship she knew, the 
Dolphin. She watched from the window and saw Tehanu on the dock. She saw her go aboard at last, 
leading a horse that had been balking, and saw Lebannen follow hen She saw the mooring lines cast off 
the docile movement of the ship following the oared tug that towed her clear, the sudden fall and 
flowering of the white 

sails in the darkness. The light of the stern lantern trembled on the dark water, shrank slowly to a tiny 
drop of brightness, and was gone. 
Tenar went about the room folding up the clothes Tehanu had worn, the silken shift and overskirt; she 
picked up the light sandals and held them to her cheek a while be-fore she put them away. 
She lay awake in the wide bed and saw before her mind�s eye over and over again the same scene: a 
road, and Tehanu walking on it alone. And a knot, a net, a black writhing coil-ing mass descending from 
the sk� dragons swarming, fire licking and streaming from them at her; her hair burning, her clothes 
burning- No, Tenar said, no! it will not happen! She would force her mind away from that scene, until 
she 
it again, the road, and Tehanu walldng on it alone, and the black, burning knot in the sky, coming closer. 
When the first light began to turn the room grey she slept at last, exhausted. She dreamed that she was in 
the Old Mage�s house on the Overfell, her house, and she was glad beyond all words to be there. She 
took the broom from be-hind the door to sweep the shining oaken floor, for Ged had let it get dusty. But 
there was a door at the back of the house that had not been there before. When she opened it she found a 
small, low room with stone walls painted white. Ged was crouching in the room, squatting with his arms 
on his knees and his hands hanging limp. His head was not a man�s head but small, black, and beaked, a 
vulture�s head. He said in a faint, hoarse voice, �Tenar, I have no wings.� And when he said that, such 
anger and terror rose up in her that she woke, gasping, to see sunlight on the high wall of her palace 
room and hear the sweet clear trumpets telling the fourth hour of morning. 
Breakfast was brought. She ate a little and talked with Berry, the elderly servant whom she had chosen 
from all the retinue of maids and ladies of honor Lebannen had offered her. Berry was an intelligent, 
competent woman, born in a village in inland Havnor, with whom Tenar got on better than with most of 
the ladies of the court. They were civil and respectEd, but they didn�t know what to do with her, how to 
talk to a woman who was half Kargish priestess, half farmwife from Gont. She saw that it was easier for 
them to be kind to Tehanu in her fierce timidity. They could be sorry for her. They could not be sorry for 
Tenar. 
Berry, however, could be and was, and she gave Tenar considerable comfort that morning. �The king 
will bring her back safe and sound,� she said. �Why, do you think he�d take the girl into a danger he 
couldn�t get her out of? Never! Not him!� It was false comfort, but Berry so passionately believed it to 
be true that Tenar had to agree with her, which was a little solace in itself. 
She needed something to do, for Tehanu�s absence was everywhere. She resolved to go talk to the 
Kargish princess, to see if the girl was willing to learn a word of Hardic, or at least to tell Tenar her 
name. 
In the Kargad Lands people did not have a true name that they kept secret, as the speakers of Hardic did. 
Like use- names here, Kargish names often had some meaning- Rose, Alder, Honor, Hope; or they were 
traditional, often the name of an ancestor. People spoke them openly and were 
proud of the antiquity of a name passed down from genera-tion to generation. She had been taken too 
young from her parents to know why they had called her Tenar, but thought it might be for a 
grandmother or great-grandmothen That name had been taken from her when she was recognised as 
Arha, the Nameless One reborn, and she had forgotten it fill Ged gave it back to her. To her, as to him, it 
was her true name; but it was not a word of the Old Speech; it gave no one any power over her, and she 
had never concealed it. 
She was puzzled now why the princess did so. Her bond- women called her only Princess, or Lady, or 

Mistress; the ambassadors had talked about her as the High Princess, Daughter of Thol, Lady of Hur-at- 
Hur, and so on. If all the poor girl had was titles, it was time she had a name. 
Tenar knew it was not fitting for a guest of the king to go alone through the streets of Havnor, and she 
knew Berry had duties in the palace, so she asked for a servant to accompany her. She was provided 
with a charming footman, or footboy, for he was only about fifteen, who looked after her at the street 
crossings as if she were a doddering crone. She liked walking in the city. She had already found and 
admitted to herseW going to the River House, that it was easier without Tehanu beside hen People 
would look at Tehanu and look away, and Tehanu walked in stiff suffering pride, hating their looks and 
their looking away, and Tenar suffered with her, maybe more than she herself did. 
Now she was able to loiter and watch the street shows, the market booths, the various faces and clothing 
from all over the Archipelago, to go out of the direct way to let her footboy show her a street where the 
painted bridges from rooftop to rooftop made a kind of airy vaulted ceiling high above them, from which 
red-flowering vines looped down in festoons, and people put birdcages out the windows on gilt poles 
among the flowers, so that it all seemed a garden in the middle of the air. �Oh, I wish Tehanu could see 
this,� she thought. But she could not think of Tehanu, of where she might be. 
The River House, like the New Palace, dated from the reign of Queen Heru, five centuries ago. It had 
been in ruins when Lebannen came to the throne; he had rebuilt it with much care, and it was a lovely, 
peacefiil place, sparsely far-nished, with dark, polished, uncarpeted floors. Ranks of nar-row doorwindows 
slid aside to open up the whole side of a room to a view of the willows and the river, and one 
could walk out onto deep wooden balconies built over the water. Court ladies had told Tenar that it had 
been the place the king liked best to slip away to for a night of solitude or a night with a lover, which 
lent even more significance, they hinted, to his housing the princess there. Her own suspicion was that 
he had not wanted the princess under the same roof with him and had simply named the only other 
possible place for her, but maybe the court ladies were right. 
Guards in their fine harness recognised and let her pass, footmen announced her and went off with her 
footboy to crack nuts and gossip, which seemed to be the principal oc-cupation of footmen, and ladies-inwaiting 
came to greet he; grateful for any new face and gasping for more news of the king�s expedition 
against the dragons. Having run the whole gamut she was admitted at last to the apartments of the 
princess. 
On her two previous visits she had been kept waiting some while in an anteroom, and then the veiled 
bondwomen had brought her into an inner room, the only dim room in the whole airy house, where the 
princess had stood in her round-brimmed hat with the red veil hanging down all round it to the floor, 
looking permanently fixed there, built in, exactly as if she were a brick chimney, as Lady Iyesa had said. 
This time it was different. As soon as she came into the anteroom there was shrieking within and the 
sound of people running in various directions. The princess burst though the door and with a wild cry 
flung her arms around Tenar. Tenar was small, and the princess, a tall, vigorous young woman fill of 
emotion, knocked her right off her feet, but held her up in strong arms. �Oh Lady Arha, Lady Arha, save 
me, save me!� she was crying. 
�Princess! What�s wrong?� 

The princess was in tears of terror or relief or both at once, and all Tenar could understand of her 
laments and pleas was a babble of dragons and sacrifice. 
�There are no dragons near Havnor,� she said sternly, disengaging herself from the girl, �and nobody is 
being sac-rificed. What is all this about? What have you been told?� 
�The women said the dragons were coming and they�d sacrifice a king�s daughter and not a goat because 
they�re sorcerers and I was afraid.� The princess wiped her face, clenched her hands, and began trying to 
master the panic she had been in. It had been real, ungovernable terror, and Tenar was sorry for her She 
did not let her pity show. The girl needed to learn to hold on to her dignity. 
�Your women are ignorant and don�t know enough Hardic to understand what people tell them. And you 
don�t know any Hardic at all. If you did you�d know there�s noth-ing to be afraid of Do you see the 
people of the house here rushing about weeping and screaming?� 
The princess stared at hen She wore no hat, no veils, and only a light shift-dress, for it was a hot day. It 
was the first time Tenar had seen her except as a dim form through the red veiling. Though the 
princess�s eyes were swollen with tears and her face blotched, she was magnificent: tawny- haired, 
tawny-eyed, with round arms and full breasts and slender waist, a woman in her first full beauty and 
strength. 
�But none of those people is going to be sacrificed,� she said finally. 
�Nobody is going to be sacrificed.� 
�Then why are the dragons coming?� 
Tenar drew a deep breath. �Princess,� she said, �there are a great many things we need to talk about. If 
you�ll look at me as your friend-� 
�I do,� the princess said. She stepped forward and took Tenar�s right arm in a very strong grasp. �You 
are my friend, I have no other friend, I will shed my blood for you.� 
Ridiculous as it was, Tenar knew it was true. 
She returned the girl�s grip as well as she could and said, �You are my friend. Tell me your name.� 
The princess�s eyes got big. There was a little snot and blubber still on her upper lip. Her lower lip 
trembled. She said, with a deep breath, �Seserakh.� 
�Seserakh: my name is not Arha, but Tenan� 
�Tenar,� the girl said, and grasped her arm tighten 
�Now,� Tenar said, trying to regain control of the situa-tion, �I have walked a long way and I�m thirsty. 
Please let�s sit down, and may I have some water to drink? And then we can talk.� 
�Yes,� said the princess, and leapt out of the room like a hunting lioness. There were shouts and cries 
from the inner rooms, and more sounds of running. A bondwoman ap-peared, adjusting her veil shakily 
and gibbering something in such thick dialect Tenar could not understand hen �Speak in the accursed 
tongue!� shouted the princess from within, and the woman pitifully squeaked out in Hardic, �To sit? to 
drink? lady?� 
Two chairs had been set in the middle of the dark, stuffy room, facing each other. Seseralch stood beside 
one of them. 
�I should like to sit outside, in the shade, over the water,� Tenar said. �If it please you, princess.� 
The princess shouted, the women scuffled, the chairs were carried out onto the deep balcony. They sat 

down side by side. 
�That�s better,� Tenar said. It was still strange to her to be speaking Kargish. She had no difficulty with 
it at all, but she felt as if she were not herselt were somebody else speak-ing, an actor enjoying her role. 
�You like the water?� the princess asked. Her face had re-turned to its normal color, that of heavy 
cream, and her eyes, no longer swollen, were bluish gold, or blue with gold flecks. 
�Yes. You don�t?� 
�I hate it. There was no water where I lived.� 
�A desert? I lived in a desert too. Until I was sixteen. Then I crossed the sea and came west. I love the 
water, the sea, the rivers.� 
�Oh, the sea,� Seserakh said, shrinking and putting her head in her hands. �Oh I hate it, I hate it. I 
vomited my soul out. Over and over and over. Days and days and days. I never want to see the sea 
again.� She shot a quick glance through the willow boughs at the quiet, shallow stream below them. 
�This river is all right,� she said distrustfiully. 
Awoman brought a tray with a pitcher and cups, and Tenar had a long drink of cool water. 
�Princess,� she said, �we have a great deal to talk about. First: the dragons are still a long way away, in 
the west. The king and my daughter have gone to talk with them.� 
�To talk with them?� 
�Yes.� She had been going to say more, but she said, �Now please tell me about the dragons in Hur-at- 
Hur.� 
Tenar had been told as a child in Atuan that there were dragons in Hur-at-Hur. Dragons in the 
mountains, brigands in the deserts. Hur-at-Hur was poor and far away and noth-ing good came from it 
but opals and turquoises and cedar logs. 
Seserakh heaved a deep sigh. Tears came into her eyes. �It makes me cry to think about home,� she said, 
with such pure simplicity of feeling that tears came into Tenar�s eyes too. �Well, the dragons live up in 
the mountains. Two days, three days journey from Mesreth. It�s all rocks up there and nobody bothers 
the dragons and they don�t bother anybody. But once a year they come down, crawling down a certain 
way. It�s a path, all smooth dust, made by their bellies crawling 
along it every year since time began. It�s called the Drag-ons� Way.� She saw that Tenar was 
listening with deep atten-tion, and went on. �It�s taboo to cross the Dragons� Way. You mustn�t set foot 
on it at all. You have to go clear round it, south of the Place of the Sacrifice. They start crawling down it 
late in spring. On the fourth day of the fifth month they�ve all arrived at the Place of the Sacrifice. None 
of them is ever late. And everybody from Mesreth and the villages is there waiting for them. And then, 
when they�ve all come down the Dragons� Way, the priests begin the sacrifice. And that�s ... Don�t you 
have the spring sacrifice, in Atuan?� 
Tenar shook her head. 
�Well, that�s why I got scared, you see, because it can be a human sacrifice. If things weren�t going 
well, they�d sacri-fice a king�s daughten Otherwise it would just be some ordi-nary girl. But they 
haven�t done even that for a long time. Not since I was little. Since my father defeated all the other 
kings. Since then, they�ve only sacrificed a she-goat and a ewe. And they catch the blood in bowls, and 
throw the fat into the sacred fire, and call to the dragons. And the dragons all come crawling up. They 
drink the blood and eat the fire.� She shut her eyes for a moment; so did Tenar. �Then they go back up 
into the mountains, and we go back to Mesreth.� 
�How big are the dragons?� 

Seserakh put her hands about a yard apart. �Sometimes bigger,� she said. 
�And they can�t fly? Or speak?� 
�Oh, no. Their wings are just little stubs. They make a kind of hissing. Animals can�t talk. But they�re 
sacred ani-mals. They�re the sign of life, because fire is life, and they eat fire and spit out fire. And 
they�re sacred because they come to the spring sacrifice. Even if no people came, the dragons would 
come and gather at that place. �We come there because the dragons do. The priests always tell all about 
that before the sacrifice.� 
Tenar absorbed this for a while. �The dragons here in the west,� she said, �are large. Huge. And they can 
fly They�re animals, but they can speak. And they are sacred. And dangerous.� 
�Well,� the princess said, �dragons may be animals, but they�re more like us than the accursed-sorcerers 
are. 
She said �accursed-sorcerers� all as one word and without any particular emphasis. Tenar remembered 
that phrase from her childhood. It meant the Dark Folk, the Hardic people of the Archipelago. 
�Why is that?� 
�Because the dragons are reborn! Like all the animals. Like us.� Seserakh looked at Tenar with frank 
curiosity �I thought since you were a priestess at the Most Sacred Place of the Tombs you�d know a lot 
more about all that than I do.� 
�But we had no dragons there,� Tenar said. �I didn�t learn anything about them at all. Please, my friend, 
tell me. 
�Well, let me see if I can tell the story about it. It�s a win-ter story I guess it�s all right to tell it in 
summer here. Every-thing here is all wrong anyway� She sighed. �Well, in the beginning, you know, in 
the first time, we were all the same, all the people and the animals, we did the same things. And then we 
learned how to die. And so we learned how to be re-born. Maybe as one kind of being, maybe another. 
But it 
doesn�t matter so much because anyhow you�ll die again and get reborn again and get to be everything 
sooner or later.� 
Tenar nodded. So far, the story was familiar to her. 
�But the best things to get reborn as are people and drag-ons, because those are the sacred beings. So 
you try not to break the taboos, and you try to observe the Precepts, so you have a better chance to be a 
person again, or anyhow a dragon... If dragons here can talk and are so big, I can see why that would be 
a reward. Being one of ours never seemed like much to look forward to. 
�But the story is about the accursed-sorcerers discovering the Vedurnan. That was a thing, I don�t know 
what it was, that told some people that if they�d agree never to die and never be reborn, they could learn 
how to do sorcery. So they chose that, they chose the Vedurnan. And they went off into the west with it. 
And it turned them dark. And they live here. All these people here-they�re the ones who chose the 
Vedurnan. They live, and they can do their accursed 
ceries, but they can�t die. Only their bodies die. The rest of them stays in a dark place and never gets 
reborn. And they look like birds. But they can�t fly� 
�Yes,� Tenar whispered. 
�You didn�t learn about that on Atuan?� 
�No,� Tenar said. 
Her mind was recalling the story the Woman of Kemay told Ogion: in the beginning of time, mankind 
and the drag-ons had been one, but the dragons chose wildness and free-dom, and mankind chose wealth 

and power. A choice, a separation. Was it the same story. 
But the image in Tenar�s heart was of Ged squatting in a stone room, his head small, black, beaked... 
�The Vedurnan isn�t that ring, is it, that they kept talking about, that I�m going to have to wear?� 
Tenar tried to force her mind away from the Painted Room and from last night�s dream to Seserakh�s 
question. 
�Ring?� 
�Urthakby�s ring.� - 
�Erreth-Akbe. No. That ring is the Ring of Peace. And you�ll wear it only if and when you�re King 
Lebannen�s queen. And you�ll be a lucky woman to be that.� 
Seserakh�s expression was curious. It was not sullen or cynical. It was hopeless, half humorous, patient, 
the expres-sion of a woman decades older. �There is no luck about it, dear friend Tenar,� she said. �I 
have to marry him. And so I will be lost.� 
�Why are you lost if you marry him?� 
�If I marry him I have to give him my name. If he speaks my name, he steals my soul. That�s what the 
accursed- sorcerers do. So they always hide their names. But if he steals my soul, I won�t be able to die. 
I�ll have to live forever with-out my body, a bird that can�t fly, and never be reborn.� 
�That�s why you hid your name?� 
�I gave it to you, my friend.� 
�I honor the gift, my friend,� Tenar said energetically. �But you can say your name to anybody you 
want, here. They can�t steal your soul with it. Believe me, Seserakh. And you can trust him. He doesn�the 
won�t do you any harm.� 
The girl had caught her hesitation. �But he wishes he could,� she said. �Tenar my friend, I know what I 
am, here. 
In that big city Awabath where my father is, I was a stupid ignorant desert woman. A feyagat The city 
women snig-gered and poked each other whenever they saw me, the barefaced whores. And here it�s 
worse. I can�t understand anybody and they can�t understand me, and everything, everything is different! 
I don�t even know what the food is, it�s sorcerer food, it makes me dizzy. I don�t know what the taboos 
are, there aren�t any priests to ask, only sorcerer women, all black and barefaced. And I saw the way he 
looked at me. You can see out of thefeyag, you know! I saw his face. He�s very handsome, he looks like 
a warrior, but he�s a black sorcerer and he hates me. Don�t say he doesn�t, be-cause I know he does. And 
I think when he learns my name he�ll send my soul to that place forever. 
After a while, gazing into the moving branches of the willows over the softly moving water, feeling sad 
and weary, Tenar said, �What you need to do, then, princess, is learn how to make him like you. What 
else can you do?� 
Seserakh shrugged mournfUlly. 
�It would help if you understood what he said.� 
�Bagabba-bagabba. They all sound like that.� 
�And we sound like that to them. Come on, princess, how can he like you if all you can say to him is 
bagabba-bagabba? Look,� and she held up her hand, pointed to it with the other, and said the word first 
in Kargish, then in Hardic. 
Seserakh repeated both words in a dutifUl tone. After a few more body parts she suddenly grasped the 
potentialities of translation. She sat up straighten �How do sorcerers say �king�?� 
�Agni. It�s a word of the Old Speech. My husband told me that.� 

She realised as she spoke that it was foolish to bring up the existence of yet a third language at this 
point; but that was not what caught the princess�s attention. 
�You have a husband?� Seserakh stared at her with lumi-nous, leonine eyes, and laughed aloud. �Oh, 
how wonderful! I thought you were a priestess! Oh please, my friend, tell me about him! Is he a warrior? 
Is he handsome? Do you love him?� 
AFTER THE KING WENT dragon hunting, Alder had no idea what to do; he felt utterly useless, 
unjustified in staying in the palace eating the king�s food, guilty for the trouble he had brought with him. 
He could not sit all day in his room, so he went out into the streets, but the splendor and activity of the 
city were daunting to him, and having no money or purpose all he could do was walk till he was tired. 
He would come back to the Palace of Maharion wondering if the stern- faced guards would readmit him. 
The nearest he came to peace was in the palace gardens. He hoped to meet Rody there again, but the 
child did not appear, and perhaps that was as well. Alder thought that he should not talk with people. 
The hands that reached to him from death would reach out to them. 
On the third day after the king�s departure he went down to walk among the garden pools. The day had 
been very hot; the evening was still and sultry. He brought Tug with him and let the little cat loose to 
stalk insects under the bushes, 
while he sat on a bench near the big willow and watched the silver-green glimmer of fat carp in the 
water He felt lonely and discouraged; he felt his defense against the voices and the reaching hands was 
breaking down. What was the good of being here, after all? Why not go into the dream once and for all, 
go down that hill, be done with it? Nobody in the world would grieve for him, and his death would spare 
them this sickness he had brought with him. Surely they had enough to do fighting dragons. Maybe if he 
went there he would see Lily. 
If he was dead they could not touch each other The wiz-ards said they would not even want to. They said 
the dead forgot what it was to be alive. But Lily had reached to him. At first, for a little while, maybe 
they would remember life long enough to look at each other; to see each other, even if they did not touch. 
�Alder.� 
He looked up slowly at the woman who stood near him. The small grey woman, Tenar. He saw the 
concern in her face, but did not know why she was troubled. Then he re-membered that her daughter, the 
burned girl, had gone with the king. Maybe there had been bad news. Maybe they were all dead. 
�Are you ill, Alder?� she asked. 
He shook his head. It was hard to talk. He understood now how easy it would be, in that other land, not 
to speak. Not to meet people�s eyes. Not to be troubled. 
She sat down on the bench beside him. �You look troubled,� she said. 
He made a vague gesture-it�s all right, it�s no matter. 
�You were on Gont. With my husband Sparrowhawk. How was he? Was he looking after himself?� 
�Yes,� Aider said. He tried to answer more adequately. �He was the kindest of hosts.� 
�I�m glad to hear that,� she said. �I worry about him. He keeps house as well as I do, but still, I didn�t 
like leaving him ~one... Please, would you tell me what he was doing while you were there?� 
He told her that Sparrowhawk had picked the plums and taken them to sell, that the two of them had 
mended the fence, that Sparrowhawk had helped him sleep. 
She listened intently, seriously, as if these small matters were as weighty as the strange events they had 
talked about here three days ago -the dead calling to a living man, a girl becoming a dragon, dragons 

setting fire to the islands of the west. 
Indeed he did not know what weighed more heavily after all, the great strange things or the small 
common ones. 
�I wish I could go home,� the woman said. 
�I could wish the same thing, but it would be in vain. I think I�ll never go home again.� He did not know 
why he said it, but heard himself say it and thought it was true. 
She looked at him a minute with her quiet grey eyes and asked no question. 
�I could wish my daughter would go home with me,� she said, �but it would be in vain, too. I know she 
must go on. I don�t know where.� 
�Will you tell me what gift it is that she has, what 
woman she is, that the king sent for her, and took her with him to meet the dragons?� 
�Oh, if I knew what she is, I�d tell you,� Tenar said, her voice full of grief and love and bitterness. 
�She�s not my daughter born, as you may have guessed or known. She came to me a little child, saved 
from the fire, but only barely and not wholly saved... When Sparrowhawk came back to me she became 
his daughter too. And she kept both him and me from a cruel death, by summoning a dragon, Kalessin, 
called Eldest. And that dragon called her daughter. So she�s the child of many and none, spared no pain 
yet spared from the fire. Who she is in truth I may never know. But I wish she were here now; safe with 
me!� 
He wanted to reassure her, but his own heart was too low 
�Tell me a little more about your wife, Alder,� she said. 
�I cannot,� he said at last into the silence that lay easily between them. �I would if I could, Lady Tenar. 
There�s such a heaviness in me, and a dread and fear; tonight. I try to think of Lily, but there�s only that 
dark desert going down and down, and I can�t see her in it. All the memories I had of her, that were like 
water and breath to me, have gone into that dry place. I have nothing left.� 
�I am sorry,� she whispered, and they sat again in silence. The dusk was deepening. It was windless, 
very warm. Lights in the palace shone through the carved window screens and the still, hanging foliage 
of the willows. 
�Something is happening,� Tenar said. �A great change in the world. Maybe nothing we knew will be 
left to us. 
Alder looked up into the darkening sky. The towers of the palace stood clear against it, their pale marble 
and al-abaster catching all the light left in the west. His eyes sought the sword blade mounted at the 
point of the highest tower and he saw it, faint silver. �Look,� he said. At the sword�s point, like a 
diamond or a drop of water shone a stan As they watched the star moved free of the sword, rising 
straight above it. 
There was a commotion, in the palace or outside the walls; voices; a horn sounded, a sharp imperative 
call. 
�They�ve come back,� Tenar said, and stood up. Excite-ment had come into the air, and Alder too stood 
up. Tenar hurried into the palace, from which the harbor could be seen. But before he took Tug back 
inside, Alder looked up again at the sword, now only a faint glimmer, and the star riding bright above it. 
DOLPHIN CAME SAILING up the harbor in that windless sum-mer night, leaning forward, urgent, the 
magewind bellying out her sails. Nobody in the palace had looked for the king to return so soon, but 
nothing was out of order or unready when he came. The quay was instantly crowded with courtiers, off

duty soldiers, and townspeople ready to greet him, and song makers and harpers were waiting to hear 
how he had fought and defeated dragons so they could make bal-lads about it. 
They were disappointed: the king and his party made straight for the palace, and the guards and sailors 
from the ship said only, �They went up into the country above On-neva Sands, and in two days they 
came back. The wizard 
sent out a message bird to us, for we were down at the Gates of the Bay by then, since we were going to 
meet them in South Port. We came back and there they were awaiting us at the river mouth, all 
unharmed. But we saw the smoke of forests afire over the South Falierns.� 
Tenar was in the crowd on the quay, and Tehanu went straight to hen They embraced fiercely. But as 
they walked up the sheet among the lights and the rejoicing voices, Tenar was still thinking, �It has 
changed. She has changed. She�ll never come home.� 
Lebannen walked among his guards. Charged with ten-sion and energy he was regal, warlike, radiant. 
�Erreth-Akbe,� peopie called out, seeing him, and �Son of Morred!� On the steps of the palace he turned 
and faced them all. He had a strong voice to use when he wanted it, and it rang out now silencing the 
tumult. �Listen, people of Havnor! The Woman of Gont has spoken for us with a chief among the 
dragons. They have pledged a tmce. One of them will come to us. A dragon will come here, to the City 
of Havnor, to the Palace of Maharion. Not to destroy but to parley. The time has come when men and 
dragons must meet and talk. So I tell you: when the dragon comes, do not fear it, do not fight it, do not 
flee it, but welcome it in the Sign of Peace. Greet it as you would greet a great lord come in peace from 
afar And have no fear. For we are well protected by the Sword of Erreth-Alcbe, by the Ring of Elfarran, 
and by the Name of Morred. And by my own name I promise you, so long as I live I will defend this city 
and this realm!� 
They listened in a breathless hush. A burst of cheers and shouts followed on his words as he turned and 
strode into the palace. �I thought it best to give them some warning,� he said in his usual quiet voice to 
Tehanu, and she nodded. He spoke to her as to a comrade, and she behaved as such. Tenar and the 
courtiers nearby saw this. 
He ordered that his fill Council meet in the morning at the fourth hour, and then they all dispersed, but 
he kept Tenar with him a minute while Tehanu went on. �It�s she who protects us,� he said. 
�Alone?� 
�Don�t fear for her. She is the dragon�s daughter, the dragon�s sister. She goes where we can�t go. Don�t 
fear for her, Tenar.� 
She bowed her head in acceptance. �I thank you for bringing her safe back to me,� she said. �For a 
while.� 
They were apart from other people, in the corridor that led to the western apartments of the palace. 
Tenar looked up at the king and said, �I�ve been talking about dragons with the princess.� 
�The princess,� he said blankly. 
�She has a name. I can�t tell it to you, since she believes you might use it to destroy her soul.� 
He scowled. 
�In Hur-at-Hur there are dragons. Small, she says, and wingless, and they don�t speak. But they�re 
sacred. The sa-cred sign and pledge of death and rebirth. She reminded me that my people don�t go 
where your people do when they die. That dry land Alder tells of it�s not where we go. The princess, and 
I, and the dragons.� 
Lebannen�s face changed from wary reserve to intense at

tention. �Ged�s questions to Tehanu,� he said in a low voice. �Are these the answers?� 
�I know only what the princess told me, or reminded me. I�ll speak with Tehanu about these things 
tonight.� 
He frowned, pondering; then his face cleared. He stooped and kissed Tenar�s cheek, bidding her good 
night. He strode off and she watched him go. He melted her heart, he dazzled her, but she was not 
blinded. �He�s still afraid of the princess,� she thought. 
THE THRONE ROOM WAS the oldest room in the Palace of Maharion. It had been the hall of Gemal 
Sea-Born, Prince of Ilien, who became king in Havnor and of whose lineage came Queen Hem and her 
son Maharion. The Havnorian Lay says: 
A hundred warriors, a hundred women sat in the great hail of Gemal Sea-Born at the king�s table, 
courtly in talk, handsome and generous gentry of Havnor, no warriors braver, no women more beautiful. 
Around this hail for over a century Gemal�s heirs had built an ever larger palace, and lastly Hem and 
Maharion had raised above it the Tower of Alabaster, the Tower of the Queen, the Tower of the Sword. 
These still stood; but though the people of Havnor had stoutly called it the New Palace all through the 
long tunes since Maharion�s death, it was old and half in ruins when Lebannen came to the throne. He 
had rebuilt it almost entirely, and richly. The merchants of the Inner Isles, in their first joy at having a 
king and laws again to protect their trad-ing, had set his revenue high and offered him yet more money 
for all such undertakings; for the first few years of his reign they had not even complained that taxation 
was de-stroying their business and would leave their children desti-tute. So he had been able to make the 
New Palace new again, and splendid. But the throne room, once the beamed ceiling was rebuilt, the 
stone walls replastered, the narrow, high-set windows reglazed, he left in its old starkness. 
Through the brief false dynasties and the Dark Years of tyrants and usurpers and pirate lords, through all 
the insults of time and ambition, the throne of the kingdom had stood at the end of the long room: a 
wooden chair, high-backed, on a plain dais. It had once been sheathed in gold. That was long gone; the 
small golden nails had left rents in the wood where they had been torn out. Its silken cushions and 
hangings had been stolen or destroyed by moth and mouse and mold. Noth-ing showed it to be what it 
was but the place where it stood and a shallow carving on the back, a heron flying with a twig of rowan 
in its beak. That was the crest of the House of Enlad. 
The kings of that house had come from Erilad to Havnor eight hundred years ago. Where Morred�s High 
Seat is, they said, the kingdom is. 
Lebannen had it cleaned, the decayed wood repaired and replaced, oiled and burnished back to dark 
satin, but left it unpainted, ungilt, bare. Some of the rich people who came to admire their expensive 
palace complained about the throne room and the throne. �It looks like a barn,� they said, and, �Is it 
Morred�s High Seat or an old farmer�s chair?� 
To which some said the king had replied, �What is a kingdom without the barns that feed it and the 
farmers to grow the grain?� Others said he had replied, �Is my kingdom gauds of gilt and velvet or does 
it stand by the strength of wood and stone?� Still others said he had said nothing except that he liked it 
the way it was. And it being his royal but-tocks that sat on the uncushioned throne, his critics did not get 
the last word on the matter. 
Into that stern and high-beamed hall, on a cool morning of late summer sea fog, filed the King�s 

Council: ninety-one men and women, a hundred if all had been there. All had been chosen by the king, 
some to represent the great noble and princely houses of the Inner Isles, pledged vassals of the Crown; 
some to speak for the interests of other islands and parts of the Archipelago; some because the king had 
found them or hoped to find them useful and trustworthy coun-selors of state. There were merchants, 
shippers, and factors of Havnor and the other great port cities of the Sea of Ea and the Inmost Sea, 
splendid in their conscious gravity and their dark robes of heavy silk. There were masters from the 
workers� guilds, flexible and canny bargainers, notable among them a pale-eyed, hard-handed woman, 
the chief of the miners of Osskil. There were Roke wizards like Onyx, with grey cloaks and wooden 
staffs. There was also a Pelnish wiz-ard, called Master Seppel, who carried no staff and of whom people 
mostly steered clear, though he seemed mild enough. There were noblewomen, young and old, from the 
kingdom�s fiefs and principalities, some in silks of Lorbanery and pearls from the Isles of Sand, and two 
Islandwomen, stout, plain, and dignified, one from flEsh and one from Korp, to speak for the people of 
the East Reach. There were some poets, some learned people from the old colleges of Ea and the Enlades, 
and several captains of soldiery or of the king�s ships. 
All these councillors the king had chosen. At the end of two or three years he would ask them to serve 
again or send them home with thanks and in honor, and replace them. All laws and taxations, all 
judgments brought before the throne, he discussed with them, taking their counsel. They would then 
vote on his proposal, and only with the consent of the majority was it enacted. There were those who 
said the coun-cil was nothing but the king�s pets and puppets, and so indeed it might have been. He 
mostly got his way if he argued for it. Often he expressed no opinion and let the council make the 
decision. Many councillors had found that if they had enough facts to support their opposition and made 
a good argument, they might sway the others and even persuade the king. So de-bates within the various 
divisions and special bodies of the council were often hotly contested, and even in fill session the king 
had several times been opposed, argued with, and voted down. He was a good diplomat, but an 
indifferent politician. 
He found his council served him well, and people of power had come to respect it. Common folk did not 
pay much attention to it. They centered their hopes and atten-tion on the king�s person. There were a 
thousand lays and ballads about the son of Morred, the prince who rode the dragon back from death to 
the shores of day, the hero of Sorra, wielder of the Sword of Serriadh, the Rowan Tree, the Tall Ash of 
Enlad, the well-loved king who ruled in the Sign of Peace. But it was hard going to make songs about 
coun-cillors debating shipping taxes. 
Unsung, then, they filed in and took their seats on the cushioned benches facing the uncushioned throne. 
They stood again as the king came in. With him came the Woman of Gont, whom most of them had seen 
before so that her ap-pearance caused no stir; and a slight man in rusty black. �Looks like a village 
sorcerer,� a merchant from Kamery said to a shipwright from Way, who answered, �No doubt,� in a 
resigned, forgiving tone. The king was loved also by many of the councillors, or at least liked; he had 
after all put power in their hands, and even if they felt no obligation to be gratefi~1 to him, they 
respected his judgment. 
The elderly Lady of Ebea hurried in late, and Prince Sege, who presided over protocol, told the council 
to be seated. They all sat down. �Hear the king,� Sege said, and they listened. 
He told them, and for many it was the first real news of these matters, about the dragons� attacks on 
West Havnor, and how he had set out with the Woman of Gont, Tehanu, to parley with them. 
He kept them in suspense while he spoke of the earlier attacks by dragons on the islands of the west, and 

told them briefly Onyx�s tale of the girl who turned into a dragon on Roke Knoll, and reminded them 
that Tehanu was claimed as daughter by Tena.r of the Ring, by the onetime Archmage of Roke, and by 
the dragon Kalessin, on whose back the king himself had been borne from Selidoit 
Then finally he told them what had happened at the pass in the Faliern Mountains at dawn three days 
ago. 
He ended by saying, �That dragon carried Tehanu�s mes-sage to Orm Irian in Paln, who then must make 
the long flight here, three hundred miles or more. But dragons are swifter than any ship even with the 
magewind. We may look for Orm Irian at any time.� 
Prince Sege asked the first question, knowing the king would welcome it: �What do you hope to gain, 
my lord, by parley with a dragon?� 
The answer was prompt: �More than we can ever gain by trying to fight it. It is a hard thing to say, but it 
is the truth: 
against the anger of these great creatures, if indeed they were to come against us in any number, we have 
no true defense. Our wise men tell us there is maybe one place that could stand against them, Roke 
Island. Arid on Roke there is maybe one man who could face the wrath of even a single dragon and not 
be destroyed. Therefore we must try to find out the cause of their anger and, by removing it, make peace 
with them.� 
�They are animals,� said the old Lord of Fellcway. �Men cannot reason with animals, make peace with 
them.� 
�Have we not the Sword of Erreth-Akbe, who slew the Great Dragon?� cried a young councillor. 
He was answered at once by another: �And who slew Erreth-Akbe?� 
Debate in the council tended to be tumultuous, though Prince Sege kept strict rule, not letting anyone 
interrupt an-other or speak for more than one turn of the two-minute sandglass. Babblers and droners 
were cut off by a crash of the prince�s silver-tipped staff and his call to the next speaker. So they talked 
and shouted back and forth at a fast pace, and all the things that had to be said and many things that did 
not need to be said were said, and refuted, and said again. Mostly 
they argued that they should go to war, fight the dragons, defeat them. 
�A band of archers on one of the king�s warships could bring them down like ducks,� cried a hotblooded 
merchant from Wathort. 
�Are we to grovel before mindless beasts? Are there no heroes left among us?� demanded the imperious 
Lady of O-tokne. 
To that, Onyx made a sharp reply: �Mindless? They speak the Language of the Making, in the 
knowledge of which our art and power lies. They are beasts as we are beasts. Men are animals that 
speak.� 
Aship�s captain, an old, far-traveled man, said, �Then isn�t it you wizards who should be talking with 
them? Since you know their speech, and maybe share their powers? The king spoke of a young untaught 
girl who turned into a dragon. But mages can take that form at will. Couldn�t the Masters of Roke speak 
with the dragons or fight with them, if need be, evenly matched?� 
The wizard from Pain stood up. He was a short man with a soft voice. �To take the form is to be the 
being, cap-tain,� he said politely. �A mage can look like a dragon. But true Change is a risky art. 
Especially now. A small change in the midst of great changes is like a breath against the ~nd... But we 
have here among us one who need use no art, and yet can speak for us to dragons better than any man 
could do. If she will speak for us.� 

At that, Tehanu stood up from her bench at the foot of the dais. �I will,� she said. And sat down again. 
That brought a pause to the discussion for a minute, but soon they were all at it again. 
The king listened and did not speak. He wanted to know the temper of his people. 
The sweet silver trumpets high on the Tower of the Sword played all their tune four times, teUing the 
sixth hour, noon. The king stood, and Prince Sege declared a recess until the first hour of the afternoon. 
Alunch of fresh cheese and summer fruits and greens was set out in a room in Queen Heru�s Tower. 
There Leban-nen invited Tehanu and Tenar, Alder, Sege, and Onyx; and Onyx, with the king�s 
permission, brought with him the Pel-nish wizard Seppel. They sat and ate together, talking little and 
quietly The windows looked over all the harbor and the north shoreline of the bay fading off into a 
bluish haze that might be either the remnants of the morning fog or smoke from the forest fires in the 
west of the island. 
Alder remained bewildered at being included among the king�s intimates and brought into his councils. 
What had he to do with dragons? He could neither fight with them nor talk with them. The idea of such 
mighty beings was great and strange to him. At moments the boasts and challenges of the councillors 
seemed to him like a yapping of dogs. He had seen a young dog once on a beach barking and barking at 
the ocean, rushing and snapping at the ebb wave, running back from the breaker with its wet tail 
between its legs. 
But he was glad to be with Tenar, who put him at ease, and whom he liked for her kindness and courage, 
and he found now that he was also at ease with Tehanu. 
Her disfigurement made it seem that she had two faces. He could not see them both at one time, only the 
one or the othen But he had got used to that and it did not disquiet him. His mother�s face had been half 
masked by its wine-red birthmark. Tehanu�s face reminded him of that. 
She seemed less restless and troubled than she had been. She sat quietly, and a couple of times she spoke 
to Alder, sit-ting next to her, with a shy comradeliness. He felt that, like him, she was there not by 
choice but because she had for-gone choice, driven to follow a way she did not understand. Maybe her 
way and his went together, for a while at least. The idea gave him courage. Knowing only that there was 
something he had to do, something begun that must be fin-ished, he felt that whatever it might be, it 
would be better done with her than without hen Perhaps she was drawn to him out of the same loneliness. 
But her conversation was not of such deep matters. �My father gave you a kitten,� she said to him as 
they left the table. �Was it one of Aunty Moss�s?� 
He nodded, and she asked, �The grey one?� 
�Yes.� 
�That was the best cat of the litter.� 
�She�s getting fat, here.� 
Tehanu hesitated and then said timidly, �I think it�s a he.� 
Alder found himself smiling. �He�s a good companion. A sailor named him Tug.� 
�Tug,� she said, and looked satisfied. 
�Tehanu,� the king said. He had sat down beside Tenar in the deep window seat. �I didn�t call on you in 
council for the people of the East Reach. There were some poets, some learned people from the old 
colleges of Ea and the En-lades, and several captains of soldiery or of the king�s ships. 
All these councillors the king had chosen. At the end of two or three years he would ask them to serve 
again or send them home with thanks and in honor, and replace them. All laws and taxations, all 
judgments brought before the throne, he discussed with them, taking their counsel. They would then 

vote on his proposal, and only with the consent of the majority was it enacted. There were those who 
said the coun-cil was nothing but the king�s pets and puppets, and so indeed it might have been. He 
mostly got his way if he argued for it. Often he expressed no opinion and let the council make the 
decision. Many councillors had found that if they had enough facts to support their opposition and made 
a good argument, they might sway the others and even persuade the king. So de-bates within the various 
divisions and special bodies of the council were often hotly contested, and even in fill session the king 
had several times been opposed, argued with, and voted down. He was a good diplomat, but an 
indifferent politician. 
He found his council served him well, and people of power had come to respect it. Common folk did not 
pay much attention to it. They centered their hopes and atten-tion on the king�s person. There were a 
thousand lays and ballads about the son of Morred, the prince who rode the dragon back from death to 
the shores of day, the hero of Sorra, wielder of the Sword of Serriadh, the Rowan Tree, the Tall Ash of 
Enlad, the well-loved king who ruled in the Sign of Peace. But it was hard going to make songs about 
coun-cillors debating shipping taxes. 
Unsung, then, they filed in and took their seats on the cushioned benches facing the uncushioned throne. 
They stood again as the king came in. With him came the Woman of Gont, whom most of them had seen 
before so that her ap-pearance caused no stir; and a slight man in rusty black. �Looks like a village 
sorcerer,� a merchant from Kamery said to a shipwright from Way, who answered, �No doubt,� in a 
resigned, forgiving tone. The king was loved also by many of the councillors, or at least liked; he had 
after all put power in their hands, and even if they felt no obligation to be gratefi~1 to him, they 
respected his judgment. 
The elderly Lady of Ebea hurried in late, and Prince Sege, who presided over protocol, told the council 
to be seated. They all sat down. �Hear the king,� Sege said, and they listened. 
He told them, and for many it was the first real news of these matters, about the dragons� attacks on 
West Havnor, and how he had set out with the Woman of Gont, Tehanu, to parley with them. 
He kept them in suspense while he spoke of the earlier attacks by dragons on the islands of the west, and 
told them briefly Onyx�s tale of the girl who turned into a dragon on Roke Knoll, and reminded them 
that Tehanu was claimed as daughter by Tena.r of the Ring, by the onetime Archmage of Roke, and by 
the dragon Kalessin, on whose back the king himself had been borne from Selidoit 
Then finally he told them what had happened at the pass in the Faliern Mountains at dawn three days 
ago. 
He ended by saying, �That dragon carried Tehanu�s mes-sage to Orm Irian in Paln, who then must make 
the long flight here, three hundred miles or more. But dragons are swifter than any ship even with the 
magewind. We may look for Orm Irian at any time.� 
Prince Sege asked the first question, knowing the king would welcome it: �What do you hope to gain, 
my lord, by parley with a dragon?� 
The answer was prompt: �More than we can ever gain by trying to fight it. It is a hard thing to say, but it 
is the truth: 
against the anger of these great creatures, if indeed they were to come against us in any number, we have 
no true defense. Our wise men tell us there is maybe one place that could stand against them, Roke 
Island. Arid on Roke there is maybe one man who could face the wrath of even a single dragon and not 
be destroyed. Therefore we must try to find out the cause of their anger and, by removing it, make peace 
with them.� 

�They are animals,� said the old Lord of Fellcway. �Men cannot reason with animals, make peace with 
them.� 
�Have we not the Sword of Erreth-Akbe, who slew the Great Dragon?� cried a young councillor. 
He was answered at once by another: �And who slew Erreth-Akbe?� 
Debate in the council tended to be tumultuous, though Prince Sege kept strict rule, not letting anyone 
interrupt an-other or speak for more than one turn of the two-minute sandglass. Babblers and droners 
were cut off by a crash of the prince�s silver-tipped staff and his call to the next speaker. So they talked 
and shouted back and forth at a fast pace, and all the things that had to be said and many things that did 
not need to be said were said, and refuted, and said again. Mostly 
they argued that they should go to war, fight the dragons, defeat them. 
�A band of archers on one of the king�s warships could bring them down like ducks,� cried a hotblooded 
merchant from Wathort. 
�Are we to grovel before mindless beasts? Are there no heroes left among us?� demanded the imperious 
Lady of O-tokne. 
To that, Onyx made a sharp reply: �Mindless? They speak the Language of the Making, in the 
knowledge of which our art and power lies. They are beasts as we are beasts. Men are animals that 
speak.� 
Aship�s captain, an old, far-traveled man, said, �Then isn�t it you wizards who should be talking with 
them? Since you know their speech, and maybe share their powers? The king spoke of a young untaught 
girl who turned into a dragon. But mages can take that form at will. Couldn�t the Masters of Roke speak 
with the dragons or fight with them, if need be, evenly matched?� 
The wizard from Pain stood up. He was a short man with a soft voice. �To take the form is to be the 
being, cap-tain,� he said politely. �A mage can look like a dragon. But true Change is a risky art. 
Especially now. A small change in the midst of great changes is like a breath against the ~nd... But we 
have here among us one who need use no art, and yet can speak for us to dragons better than any man 
could do. If she will speak for us.� 
At that, Tehanu stood up from her bench at the foot of the dais. �I will,� she said. And sat down again. 
That brought a pause to the discussion for a minute, but soon they were all at it again. 
The king listened and did not speak. He wanted to know the temper of his people. 
The sweet silver trumpets high on the Tower of the Sword played all their tune four times, teUing the 
sixth hour, noon. The king stood, and Prince Sege declared a recess until the first hour of the afternoon. 
Alunch of fresh cheese and summer fruits and greens was set out in a room in Queen Heru�s Tower. 
There Leban-nen invited Tehanu and Tenar, Alder, Sege, and Onyx; and Onyx, with the king�s 
permission, brought with him the Pel-nish wizard Seppel. They sat and ate together, talking little and 
quietly The windows looked over all the harbor and the north shoreline of the bay fading off into a 
bluish haze that might be either the remnants of the morning fog or smoke from the forest fires in the 
west of the island. 
Alder remained bewildered at being included among the king�s intimates and brought into his councils. 
What had he to do with dragons? He could neither fight with them nor talk with them. The idea of such 
mighty beings was great and strange to him. At moments the boasts and challenges of the councillors 
seemed to him like a yapping of dogs. He had seen a young dog once on a beach barking and barking at 
the ocean, rushing and snapping at the ebb wave, running back from the breaker with its wet tail 
between its legs. 

But he was glad to be with Tenar, who put him at ease, and whom he liked for her kindness and courage, 
and he found now that he was also at ease with Tehanu. 
Her disfigurement made it seem that she had two faces. He could not see them both at one time, only the 
one or the othen But he had got used to that and it did not disquiet him. His mother�s face had been half 
masked by its wine-red birthmark. Tehanu�s face reminded him of that. 
She seemed less restless and troubled than she had been. She sat quietly, and a couple of times she spoke 
to Alder, sit-ting next to her, with a shy comradeliness. He felt that, like him, she was there not by 
choice but because she had for-gone choice, driven to follow a way she did not understand. Maybe her 
way and his went together, for a while at least. The idea gave him courage. Knowing only that there was 
something he had to do, something begun that must be fin-ished, he felt that whatever it might be, it 
would be better done with her than without hen Perhaps she was drawn to him out of the same loneliness. 
But her conversation was not of such deep matters. �My father gave you a kitten,� she said to him as 
they left the table. �Was it one of Aunty Moss�s?� 
He nodded, and she asked, �The grey one?� 
�Yes.� 
�That was the best cat of the litter.� 
�She�s getting fat, here.� 
Tehanu hesitated and then said timidly, �I think it�s a he.� 
Alder found himself smiling. �He�s a good companion. A sailor named him Tug.� 
�Tug,� she said, and looked satisfied. 
�Tehanu,� the king said. He had sat down beside Tenar in the deep window seat. �I didn�t call on you in 
council today to speak of the questions Lord Sparrowhawk asked you. It was not the time. Is it the 
place?� 
Alder watched her. She considered before answering. She glanced once at her mother, who made no 
answering sign. 
�I�d rather speak to you here,� she said in her hoarse voice. �And maybe to the Princess of Hur-at-Hur.� 
After a brief pause the king said pleasantly, �Shall I send for her?� 
�No, I can go see her. Afterward. I haven�t much to say, really. My father asked, Who goes to the dry 
land when they die? And my mother and I talked about it. And we thought, people go there, but do the 
beasts? Do birds fly there? Are there trees, does the grass grow? Alder, you�ve seen it. 
Taken by surprise, he could say only, �There.., there�s grass, on the hither side of the wall, but it seems 
dead. Be-yond that I don�t know.� 
Tehanu looked at the king. �You walked across that land, my lord.� 
�I saw no beast, or bird, or growing thing.� 
Alder spoke again: �Lord Sparrowhawk said: dust, rock.� 
�I think no beings go there at death but human beings,� Tehanu said. �But not all of them.� Again she 
looked at her mother, and did not look away. 
Tenar spoke. �The Kargish people are like the animals.� Her voice was dry and let no feeling be heard. 
�They die to be reborn.� 
�That is superstition,� Onyx said. �Forgive me, Lady Tenar, but you yourself-� He paused. 
�I no longer believe,� Tenar said, �that I am or was, as they told me, Arha forever reborn, a single soul 
reincarnated 
endlessly and so immortal. I do believe that when I die I will, like any mortal being, rejoin the greater 

being of the world. Like the grass, the trees, the animals. Men are only animals that speak, sir, as you 
said this morning.� 
�But we can speak the Language of the Making,� the wizard protested. �By learning the words by which 
Segoy made the world, the very speech of life, we teach our souls to conquer death.� 
�That place where nothing is but dust and shadows, is that your conquest?� Her voice was not dry now, 
and her eyes flashed. 
Onyx stood indignant but wordless. 
The king intervened. �Lord Sparrowhawk asked a sec-ond question,� he said. �Can a dragon cross the 
wall of stones?� He looked at Tehanu. 
�It�s answered in the first answer,� she said, �if dragons 
are only animals that speak, and animals don�t go there. Has 
a mage ever seen a dragon there? Or you, my lord?� She 
looked first at Onyx, then at Lebannen. Onyx pondered only 
a moment before he said, �No.~~ 
The king looked amazed. �How is it I never thought of that?� he said. �No, we saw none. I think there 
are no drag-ons there.� 
�My lord,� Alder said, louder than he had ever said any-thing in the palace, �there is a dragon here.� He 
was stand-ing facing the window, and he pointed at it. 
They all turned. In the sky above the Bay of Havnor they saw a dragon flying from the west. Its long, 
slow-beating, vaned wings shone red-gold. A curl of smoke drifted behind it for a moment in the hazy 
summer air. 
�Now,� the king said, �what room do I make ready for this guest?� 
He spoke as if amused, bemused. But the instant he saw the dragon turn and come wheeling in towards 
the Tower of the Sword, he ran from the room and down the stairs, startling and outstripping the guards 
in the halls and at the doors, so that he came out first and alone on the terrace under the white tower. 
The terrace was the roof of a banquet hail, a wide ex-panse of marble with a low balustrade, the Sword 
Tower rising directly over it and the Queen�s Tower nearby. The dragon had alighted on the pavement 
and was furling its wings with a loud metallic rattle as the king came out. Where it came down its talons 
had scratched grooves in the marble. 
The long, gold-mailed head swung round. The dragon looked at the king. 
The king looked down and did not meet its eyes. But he stood straight and spoke clearly. �Orm Irian, 
welcome. I am Lebannen.� 
~4gni Lebannen,� said the great hissing voice, greeting him as Orm Embar had greeted him long ago, in 
the farthest west, before he was a king. 
Behind him, Onyx and Tehanu had run out onto the ter-race along with several guards. One guard had 
his sword out, and Lebannen saw, in a window of the Queen�s Tower, an-other with drawn bow and 
notched arrow aimed at the dragon�s breast. �Put down your weapons!� he shouted in a voice that made 

the towers ring, and the guard obeyed in such haste that he nearly dropped his sword, but the archer 
lowered his bow reluctantly, finding it hard to leave his lord defenseless. 
�Medeu,� Tehanu whispered, coming up beside Leban-nen, her gaze unwavering on the dragon. The 
great creature�s head swung round again and the immense amber eye in a socket of shining, wrinkled 
scales gazed back, unblinking. 
The dragon spoke. 
Onyx, understanding, murmured to the king what it said and what Tehanu replied. �Kalessin�s daughter, 
my sister,� it said. �You do not fly.� 
�I cannot change, sister,� Tehanu said. 
�Shall I?� 
�For awhile, if you will.� 
Then those on the terrace and in the windows of the tow-ers saw the strangest thing they might ever see 
however long they lived in a world of sorceries and wonders. They saw the dragon, the huge creature 
whose scaled belly and thorny tail dragged and stretched half across the breadth of the terrace, and 
whose red-horned head reared up twice the height of the king-they saw it lower that big head, and 
tremble so that its wings rattled like cymbals, and not smoke but a mist breathed out of its deep nostrils, 
clouding its shape, so that it became cloudy like thin fog or worn glass; and then it was gone. The 
midday sun beat down on the scored, scarred, white pave-ment. There was no dragon. There was a 
woman. She stood some ten paces from Tehanu and the king. She stood where the heart of the dragon 
might have been. 
She was young, tall, and strongly built, dark, dark-haired, wearing a farm woman�s shift and trousers, 
barefoot. She stood motionless, as if bewildered. She looked down at her body. She lifted up her hand 
and looked at it. �The little thing!� she said, in the common speech, and she laughed. She looked at 
Tehanu. �It�s like putting on the shoes I wore when I was five,� she said. 
The two women moved towards each other. With a cer-tain stateliness, like that of armed warriors 
saluting or ships meeting at sea, they embraced. They held each other lightly, but for some moments. 
They drew apart, and both turned to face the king. 
�Lady Irian,� he said, and bowed. 
She looked a little nonplussed and made a kind of coun-try curtsey. When she looked up he saw her eyes 
were the color of amben He looked instantly away. 
�I�ll do you no harm in this guise,� she said, with a broad, white smile. �Your majesty,� she added 
uncomfortably, trying to be polite. 
He bowed again. It was he that was nonplussed now. He looked at Tehanu, and round at Tenar, who had 
come out onto the terrace with Aldet Nobody said anything. 
Irian�s eyes went to Onyx, standing in his grey cloak just behind the king, and her face lighted up again. 

�Sir,� she said, �are you from Roke Island? Do you know the Lord Patterner?� 
Onyx bowed or nodded. He too kept his eyes from hers. 
�Is he well? Does he walk among his trees?� 
Again the wizard bowed. 
�And the Doorkeeper, and the Herbal, and Kurrem-karmerruk? They befriended me, they stood by me. If 
you go back there, greet them with my love and honor, if you please.� 
�I will,� the wizard said. 
�My mother is here,� Tehanu said softly to Irian. �Tenar of Atuan.� 
�Tenar of Gont,� Lebannen said, with a certain ring to his voice. 
Looking with open wonder at Tenar, Irian said, �It was you that brought the Rune Ring from the land of 
the Hoary Men, along with the Archmage?� 
�It was,� Tenar said, staring with equal frankness at Irian. 
Above them on the balcony that encircled the Tower of the Sword near its summit there was movement: 
the trum-peters had come out to sound the hour, but at the moment all four of them were gathered on the 
south side overlooking the terrace, peering down to see the dragon. There were faces in every window of 
the palace towers, and the thrum of voices down in the streets could be heard like a tide coming in. 
�When they sound the first hour,� Lebannen said, �the council will gather again. The councillors will 
have seen you come, my lady, or heard of your coming. So if it please you, I think it best that we go 
straight among them and let them behold you. And if you�ll speak to them I promise you they�ll listen.� 
�Very well,� Irian said. For a moment there was a ponder-ous, reptilian impassivity in hen When she 
moved, that van-ished, and she seemed only a tall young woman who stepped forward quite awkwardly, 
saying with a smile to Tehanu, �I feel as if I�ll float up like a spark, there�s no weight to me!� 
The four trumpets up in the tower sounded to west, north, east, south in turn, one phrase of the lament a 
king five hundred years ago had made for the death of his friend. 
For a moment the king now remembered the face of that man, Erreth-Akbe, as he stood on the beach of 
Se]idor, dark-eyed, sorrowful, mortally wounded, among the bones of the dragon who had killed him. 
Lebannen felt it strange that he should think of such faraway things at such a mo-ment; and yet it was 
not strange, for the living and the dead, men and dragons, all were drawing together to some event he 
could not see. 
He paused until Irian and Tehanu came up to him. As he walked on into the palace with them he said, 
�Lady Irian, there are many things I would ask you, but what my people fear and what the council will 
desire to know is whether your people intend to make war on us, and why.� 
She nodded, a heavy decisive nod. �I will tell them what I know.� 
When they came to the curtained doorway behind the dais, the throne room was all in confusion, an 
uproar of voices, so that the crash of Prince Sege�s staff was barely heard at first. Then silence came 
suddenly on them and they all turned to see the king come in with the dragon. 
Lebannen did not sit but stood before the throne, and Irian stood to his left. 
�Hear the king,� Sege said into that dead silence. 
The king said, �Councillors! This is a day that will long be told and sung. Your sons� daughters and your 
daughters� sons will say, �I am the grandchild of one who was of the Dragon Council!� So honor her 
whose presence honors us. Hear Orm Irian.� 
Some of those who were at the Dragon Council said af-terwards that if they looked straight at her she 
seemed only a 

tall woman standing there, but if they looked aside what they saw in the corner of their eye was a vast 
shimmer of smoky gold that dwarfed king and throne. And many of them, knowing a man must not look 
into a dragon�s eye, did look aside; but they stole glimpses too. The women looked at her, some thinking 
her plain, some beautifiil, some pitying her for having to go barefoot in the palace. And a few councillors, 
not having rightly understood, wondered who the woman was, and when the dragon would be 
coming. 
All the time she spoke, that complete silence endured. Though her voice had the lightness of most 
women�s voices, it filled the high hall easily. She spoke slowly and formally, as if she were translating 
in her mind from the older speech. 
�My name was Irian, of the Domain of Old Iria on Way. 
I am Orm Irian now. Kalessin, the Eldest, calls me daughter. 
I am sister to Orm Embar whom the king knew, and grand-child of Orm, who killed the king�s 
companion Erreth-Akbe 
and was killed by him. I am here because my sister Tehanu 
called to me. 
�When Orm Embar died on Seidor, destroying the mor-tal body of the wizard Cob, Kalessin came from 
beyond the west and brought the king and the great mage to Roke. Then returning to the Dragons� Run, 
the Eldest called the people of the west, whose speech had been taken from them by Cob, and who were 
still bewildered. Kalessin said to them, �You let evil turn you into evil. You have been mad. You are 
sane again, but so long as the winds blow from the east you can never be what you were, free of both 
good and evil.� 
�Kalessin said: �Long ago we chose. We chose freedom. Men chose the yoke. We chose fire and the 
wind. They chose water and the earth. We chose the west, and they the east. 
�And Kalessin said: �But always among us some envy them their wealth, and always among them some 
envy us our liberty. So it was that evil came into us and will come into us again, until we choose again, 
and forever, to be free. Soon I am going beyond the west to fly on the other wind. I will lead you there, 
or wait for you, if you will come. 
�Then some of the dragons said to Kalessin, �Men in their envy of us long ago stole half our realm 
beyond the west from us and made walls of spells to keep us out of it. So now let us drive them into the 
farthest east, and take back the islands! Men and dragons cannot share the wind.� 
�Then Kalessin said, �Once we were one people. And in sign of that, in every generation of men, one or 
two are born who are dragons also. And in every generation of our people, longer than the quick lives of 
men, one of us is born who is also human. Of these one is now living in the Inner Isles. And there is one 
of them living there now who is a dragon. These two are the messengers, the bringers of choice. There 
will be no more such born to us or to them. For the balance changes.� 
�And Kalessin said to them: �Choose. Come with me to fly on the far side of the world, on the other 
wind. Or stay and put on the yoke of good and evil. Or dwindle into dumb beasts.� And at the last 
Kalessin said: �The last to make the choice will be Tehanu. After her there will be no choosing. There 
will be no way west. Only the forest will be, as it is a]-ways, at the center 
The people of the King�s Council were still as stones, lis-tening. Irian stood moveless, gazing as if 
through them, as she spoke. 
�After some years had passed, Kalessin flew beyond the west. Some followed, some did not. When I 
came to join my people, I followed Kalessin. But I go there and come back, so long as the winds will 

bear me. 
�The disposition of my people is jealous and irate. Those who stayed here on the winds of the world 
began to fly in bands or singly to the isles of men, saying again, �They stole half our realm. Now we will 
take all the west of their realm, and drive them out of it, so they cannot bring their good and evil to us 
any more. We will not put our necks into their yoke.� 
�But they did not try to kill the islanders, because they re-membered being mad, when dragon killed 
dragon. They hate you, but they will not kill you unless you try to kill them. 
�So one of these bands has come now to this island, Havnor, that we call the Cold Hill. The dragon who 
came before them and spoke to Tehanu is my brother Ammaud. They seek to drive you into the east, but 
Ammaud, like me, enacts the will of Kalessin, seeking to free my people from the yoke you wear. If he 
and I and the children of Kalessin can prevent harm to your people and ours, we will do so. But dragons 
have no king, and obey no one, and will fly where they will. For a while they will do as my brother and I 
ask in Kalessin�s name. But not for long. And they fear nothing in the world, except your wizardries of 
death.� 
That last word rang heavily in the great hall in the silence that followed Irian�s voice. 
The king spoke, thanking Irian. He said, �You honor us with your truth-speaking. By my name, we will 
speak truth to you. I beg you to tell me, daughter of Kalessin who bore me to my kingdom, what it is you 
say the dragons fear? I thought they feared nothing in the world or out of it.� 
�We fear your spells of immortality,� she said bluntly. 
�Of immortality?� Lebannen hesitated. �I am no wizard. Master Onyx, speak for me, if the daughter of 
Kalessin will permit.� 
Onyx stood up. Irian looked at him with cold, impartial eyes, and nodded. 
�Lady Irian,� the wizard said, �we make no spells of immortality Only the wizard Cob sought to make 
himself im-mortal, perverting our art to do so.� He spoke slowly and with evident care, searching his 
mind as he spoke. �Our Archmage, with my lord the king, and with the aid of Orm Embar, destroyed 
Cob and the evil he had done. And the Archmage gave all his power up to heal the world, restoring the 
Equilibrium. No other wizard in our lifetime has sought to-� He stopped short. 
Irian looked straight at him. He looked down. 
�The wizard I destroyed,� she said, �the Summoner of Roke, Thorion-what was it he sought?� 
Onyx, stricken, said nothing. 
�He came back from death,� she said. �But not living, as the Archmage and the king did. He was dead, 
but he came back across the wall by his arts-by your arts-you men of Roke! How are we to trust 
anything you say? You have un-made the balance of the world. Can you restore it?� 
Onyx looked at the king. He was openly distressed. �My 
lord, I cannot think that this is the place to discuss such mat-ters-before all men-until we know what we 
are talking about, and what we must do. . 
�Roke keeps its secrets,� Irian said with calm scorn. 
�But on Roke-� Tehanu said, not standing; her weak voice died away. Prince Sege and the king both 
looked at her and motioned her to speak. 
She stood up. At first she kept the left side of her face to the councillors, all sitting motionless on their 
benches, like stones with eyes. 
�On Roke is the Immanent Grove,� she said. �Isn�t that what Kalessin meant, sister, speaking of the 
forest that is at the center?� Turning to Irian, she showed the people watch-ing her the whole ruin of her 

face; but she had forgotten them. �Maybe we need to go there,� she said. �To the center of things.� 
Irian smiled. �I�ll go there,� she said. 
They both looked at the king. 
�Before I send you to Roke, or go with you,� he said slowly, �I must know what is at stake. Master 
Onyx, I�m sorry that matters so grave and chancy force us to debate our course so openly. But I trust my 
councillors to support me as I find and hold the course. What the council needs to know is that our 
islands need not fear attack from the People of the VVest-that the truce, at least, holds.� 
�It holds,� Irian said. 
�Can you say how long?� 
�A half year?� she offered, carelessly, as if she had said, �A day or two.� 
�We will hold the truce a half year, in hope of peace to follow. Am I right to say, Lady Irian, that to have 
peace with us, your people want to know that our wizards� meddling with the.., laws of life and death 
will not endanger them?� 
�Endanger all of us,� Irian said. �Yes.� 
Lebannen considered this and then said, in his most royal, affable, urbane manner; �Then I believe I 
should come to Roke with you.� He turned to the benches. �Coundillors, with the truce declared, we 
must seek the peace. I�ll go wher-ever I must on that quest, ruling as I do in the Sign of El-farran�s Ring. 
If you see any hindrance to this journey, speak here and now. For it may be that the balance of power 
within the Archipelago, as well as the Equilibrium of the whole, is in question. And if I go, I must go 
now. Autumn is near, and it�s not a short voyage to Roke Island.� 
The stones with eyes sat there for a long minute, all star-ing, none speaking. Then Prince Sege said, �Go, 
my lord king, go with our hope and trust, and the magewind in your sails.� There was a little murmur of 
assent from the council-lors: Yes, yes, hear him. 
Sege asked for further questions or debate; nobody spoke. He closed the session. 
Leaving the throne room with him, Lebannen said, �Thank you, Sege,� and the old prince said, 
�Between you and the dragon, Lebannen, what could the poor souls say?� 

CHAPTER IV 
Dolphin 
MANY MATTERS HAD TO BE settled and arrangements made before the king could leave his capital; 
there was also the question of who should go with him to Roke. Irian and Tehanu, of course, and Tehanu 
wanted her mother with her. Onyx said that Alder should by all means go with them, and also the 
Pelnish wizard Seppel, for the Lore of Pain had much to do with these matters of crossing between life 
and death. The king chose Tosla to captain the Dolphin, as he had done before. Prince Sege would look 
after affairs of state in the king�s absence, with a selected group of council-lors, as he also had done 
before. 
So it was all settled, or so Lebannen thought, until Tenar came to him two days before they were to sail 
and said, �You�ll be talking of war and peace with the dragons, and of matters even beyond that, Irian 
says, matters that concern the balance of all things in Earthsea. The people of the Kargad Lands should 
hear these discussions and have a voice in them.� 
�You will be their representative.� 
�Not I. I am not a subject of the High King. The only person here who can represent his people is his 
daughten� 
Lebannen took a step away from her, turned partly from her, and at last said in a voice stifled by the 
effort to speak without anger, �You know that she is completely unfitted for such a journey.� 
�I know nothing of the kind.� 
�She has no education.� 
�She�s intelligent, practical, and courageous. She�s aware of what her station requires of hen She hasn�t 
been trained to nile, but then what can she learn boxed up there in the River House with her servants and 
some court ladies?� 
�To speak the language, in the first place!� 

�She�s doing that. I�ll interpret for her when she needs it.� After a brief pause Lebannen spoke carefully: 
�1 under-stand your concern for her people. I will consider what can be done. But the princess has no 
place on this voyage. 
�Tehanu and Irian both say she should come with us. Master Onyx says that, like Alder of Taon, her 
being sent here at this time cannot be an accident.� 
Lebannen walked farther away. His tone remained stiffly patient and polite: �I cannot permit it. Her 
ignorance and inexperience would make her a serious burden. And I can�t put her at risk. Relationships 
with her father-� 
�In her ignorance, as you call it, she showed us how to answer Ged�s questions. You are as disrespectful 
of her as her father is. You speak of her as of a mindless thing.� Tenar�s face was pale with angen �If 
you�re afraid to put her at risk, ask her to take it herself� 
Again there was a silence. Lebannen spoke with the same wooden calmness, not looking directly at hen 
�If you and Tehanu and Orm Irian believe this woman should come with us to Roke, and Onyx agrees 
with you, I accept your judgment, though I believe it is mistaken. Please tell her that if she wishes to 
come, she may do so. 
�It is you who should tell her that.� 
He stood silent. Then he walked out of the room with-out a word. 
He passed close by Tenar, and though he did not look at her he saw her clearly. She looked old and 
strained, and her hands trembled. He was sorry for her, ashamed of his rude-ness to her, relieved that no 
one else had witnessed the scene; but these feelings were mere sparks in the huge darkness of his anger 
at her, at the princess, at everyone and everything that laid this false obligation, this grotesque duty on 
him. As he went out of the room he tugged open the collar of his shirt as if it were choking him. 
His majordomo, a slow and steady man called Thor-oughgood, was not expecting him to return so soon 
or through that door and jumped up, staring and startled. Lebannen returned his stare icily and said, 
�Send for the High Princess to attend me here in the afternoon.� 
�The High Princess?� 
�Is there more than one of them? Are you unaware that the High King�s daughter is our guest?� 
Amazed, Thoroughgood stammered an apology, which Lebannen interrupted: �I shall go to the River 
House myself.� And he strode on out, pursued, impeded, and gradually con-trolled by the majordomo�s 
attempts to slow him down long enough for a suitable retinue to be gathered, horses to be brought from 
the stables, the petitioners waiting for audience in the Long Room to be put off till afternoon, and so on. 
All his obligations, all his duties, all the trappery and trammel, rites and hypocrisies that made him king 
pulled at him, suck-ing and tugging him down like quicksand into suffocation. 

When his horse was brought across the stable yard to him, he swung up into the saddle so abruptly that 
the horse caught his mood and backed and reared, driving back the hostlers and attendants. To see the 
circle widen out around him gave Lebannen a harsh satisfaction. He set the horse straight for the 
gateway without waiting for the men in his retinue to mount. He led them at a sharp trot through the 
streets of the city, far ahead of them, aware of the dilemma of the young officer who was supposed to 
precede him calling, �Way for the king!� but who had been left behind him and now did not dare ride 
past him. 
It was near noon; the streets and squares of Havnor were hot and bright and mostly deserted. Hearing the 
clatter of hooves, people hurried to the doorways of little dark shops to stare and recognise and salute the 
king. Women sitting in their windows fanning themselves and gossiping across the way looked down 
and waved, and one of them threw a flower down at him. His horse�s hooves rang on the bricks of a 
broad, sunbaked square that lay empty except for a curly- tailed dog trotting away on three legs, 
unconcerned with roy-ally Out of the square the king took a narrow passage that led to the paved way 
beside the Serrenen, and followed it in the shadow of the willows under the old city wall to River House. 
The ride had changed his temper somewhat. The heat 
and silence and beauty of the city the sense of multitudinous life behind walls and shutters, the smile of 
the woman who had tossed a flower, the petty satisfaction of keeping ahead of all his guardians and 
pomp makers, then finally the scent and coolness of the river ride and the shady courtyard of the house 
where he had known days and nights of peace and pleasure, all took him a little distance from his anger. 
He felt estranged from himseW no longer possessed but emptied. 
The first riders of his retinue were just coming into the courtyard as he swung off his horse, which was 
glad to stand in the shade. He went into the house, dropping among doz-ing footmen like a stone into a 
glassy pond, causing quick- widening circles of dismay and panic. He said, �Tell the princess that I am 
here.� 
Lady Opal of the Old Demesne of Ilien, currently in charge of the princess�s ladies-in-waiting, appeared 
promptly, greeted him graciously, offered him refreshment, behaved quite as if his visit were no surprise 
at all. This suavity half placated, half irritated him. Endless hypocrisy! But what was Lady Opal to dogawp 
like a stranded fish (as a very young lady-in-waiting was doing) because the king had finally and 
unexpectedly come to see the princess? 
�I�m so sorry Mistress Tenar isn�t here at present,� she said. �It�s so much easier to converse with the 
princess with her help. But the princess is making admirable progress in the language.� 
Lebannen had forgotten the problem of language. He accepted the cool drink offered him and said 
nothing. Lady Opal made small talk with the assistance of the other ladies, getting very little from the 
king. He had begun to realise that he would probably be expected to speak with the princess in the 
company of all her ladies, as was only propen Whatever he had intended to say to her, it had become 
impossible to say anything. He was just about to get up and excuse himseW when a woman whose head 
and shoulders were hidden by a red circular veil appeared in the doorway, fell plop on her knees, and 
said, �Please? King? Princess? Please?� 
�The princess will receive you in her chambers, sire,� Lady Opal interpreted. She waved to a footman, 
who es-corted him upstairs, along a hall, through an anteroom, through a large, dark room that seemed to 
be crammed ab-solutely full of women in red veils, and out onto a balcony over the river. There stood 
the figure he remembered: the immobile cylinder of red and gold. 
The breeze from the water made the veils tremble and shimmer, so that the figure did not appear solid 

but delicate, moving, shivering, like the willow foliage. It seemed to shrink, to shorten. She was making 
her courtesy to him. He bowed to her. They both straightened up and stood in silence. 
�Princess,� Lebannen said, with a feeling of unreality hearing his own voice, �I am here to ask you to 
come with us to Roke Island.� 
She said nothing. He saw the fine red veils part in an oval as she spread them with her hands. Longfingered, 
golden-skinned hands, held apart to reveal her face in the red shadow. He could not see her 
features clearly. She was nearly as tall as he, and her eyes looked straight at him. 
�My friend Tenar,� she said, �say: king to see king, face and face. I say: yes. I will.� 
Half understanding, Lebannen bowed again. �You honor me, my lady.� 
�Yes,� she said. �I honor you.� 
He hesitated. This was a different ground entirely. Her ground. 
She stood there straight and still, the gold edging of her veils shivering, her eyes looking at him out of 
the shadow. 
�Tenar, and Tehanu, and Orm Irian, agree that it would be well if the Princess of the Kargad Lands were 
with us on Roke Island. So I ask you to come with us.� 
�To come.� 
�To Roke Island.� 
�On ship,� she said, and suddenly made a little moaning plaintive noise. Then she said, �I will. I will to 
come.� 
He did not know what to say. He said, �Thank you, my lady.� 
She nodded once, equal to equal. 
He bowed. He left her as he had been taught to leave the presence of his father the prince at formal 
occasions in the court of Enlad, not turning his back but stepping backwards. 
She stood facing him, still holding her veil parted till he reached the doorway Then she dropped her 
hands, and the veils closed, and he heard her gasp and breathe out hard as if in release from an act of 
will sustained almost past endurance. 
Courageous, Tenar had called her. He did not under-stand, but he knew that he been in the presence of 
courage. All the anger that had filled him, brought him here, was gone, vanished. He had not been 
sucked down and suffo-cated, but brought up short in front of a rock, a high place in clear air, a truth. 
He went out through the room fUll of murmuring, per-fumed, veiled women who shrank back from him 
into the darkness. Downstairs, he chatted a little with Lady Opal and the others, and had a kind word for 
the gawping twelve- year-old lady-in-waiting. He spoke pleasantly to the men of his retinue waiting for 
him in the courtyard. He quietly mounted his tall grey horse. He rode quietly, thoughtfully, back to the 
Palace of Maharion. 
ALDER HEARD WITH fatalistic acceptance that he was to sail back to Roke. His waking life had 
become so strange to him, more dreamlike than his dreams, that he had little will to question or protest. 
If he was fated to sail from island to is-land the rest of his life, so be it; he knew there was no such thing 
as going home for him now. At least he would be in the company of the ladies Tenar and Tehanu, who 
put his heart at ease. And the wizard Onyx had also shown him kindness. 
Alder was a shy man and Onyx a deeply reserved one, and there was all the difference of their 
knowledge and sta-tus to be bridged; but Onyx had come to him several times simply to talk as one man 
of the art to another, showing a re-spect for Alder�s opinion that puzzled his modesty. But Alder could 

not Withhold his trust; and so when the time to depart was near at hand, he took to Onyx the question 
that had been worrying him. 
�It�s the little cat,� he said with embarrassment. �I don�t feel right about taking him. Keeping him 
cooped up so long. It�s unnatural for a young creature. And I think, what would become of him...� 
Onyx did not ask what he meant. He asked only, �He still helps you keep from the wall of stones?� 
�Well, often he does. 
Onyx pondered. �You need some protection, till we get to Roke. I have thought... Have you spoken with 
the wizard Seppel here?� 
�The man from Paln,� Alder said, with a slight unease in his voice. 
Pain, the greatest island west of Havnor, had the reputa-tion of being an uncanny place. The Pelnish 
spoke Hardic with a peculiar accent, using many words of their own. Their lords had in ancient times 
refused fealty to the kings of Enlad and Havnon Their wizards did not go to Roke for their training. The 
Pelnish Lore, which called upon the Old Powers of the Earth, was widely believed to be dangerous if not 
sinister. Long ago the Grey Mage of PaIn had brought ruin on his island by summoning the souls of the 
dead to ad-vise him and his lords, and that tale was part of the education of every sorcerer: �The living 
should not take counsel of the dead.� There had been more than one duel in wizardry be-tween a man of 
Roke and a man of Paln; in one such combat two centuries ago a plague had been loosed on the people 
of Paln and Semel that had left half the towns and farmlands desolate. And fifteen years ago, when the 
wizard Cob had used the Pelnish Lore to cross between life and death, the Archmage Sparrowhawk had 
spent all his own power to de-feat him and heal the evil he had done. 
Alder, like almost everyone else at court and in the King�s Council, had politely avoided the wizard 
Seppel. 
�I�ve asked the king to bring him with us to Roke,� said Onyx. 
Alder blinked. 
�They know more than we do about these mailers,� Onyx said. �Most of our art of Summoning comes 
from the Pelnish Lore. Thorion was a master of it... The Summoner of Roke now, Brand of Venway, 
won�t use any part of his craft that draws from that lore. Misused, it has brought only harm. But it may 
be only our ignorance that�s led us to use it wrongly. It goes back to very ancient times; there may be 
knowledge in it we�ve lost. Seppel is a wise man and mage. I think he should be with us. And I think he 
might help you, if you can trust him.� 
�If he has your trust,� Alder said, �he has mine.� 
When Alder spoke with the silver tongue of Taon, Onyx was likely to smile a little drily. �Your 
judgment�s as good as mine, Alder, in this business,� he said. �Or better. I hope you use it. But I�ll take 
you to him.� 
So they went down into the city together. Seppel�s lodg-ing was in an old part of town near the 
shipyards, just off Boatwright Street; there was a little colony of Pelnish folk there, brought in to work in 
the king�s yards, for they were great shipbuilders. The houses were ancient, crowded close, with the 
bridges between roof and roof that gave Havnor Great Port a second, airy web of streets high above its 

paved ones. 
Seppel�s rooms, up three flights of stairs, were dark and close in the heat of this late summer. He took 
them up one more steep flight onto the roof It was joined to other roofs by a bridge on each side, so that 
there was a regular crossroads 
and thoroughfare across it. Awnings were set up by the low parapets, and the breeze from the 
harbor cooled the shaded air. There they sat on striped canvas mats in the cor-ner that was Seppel�s bit 
of the roof, and he gave them a cool, slightly bitter tea to drink. 
He was a short man of about fifty, round-bodied, with small hands and feet, hair that was a little curly 
and unruly, and what was rare among men of the Archipelago, a beard, clipped short, on his dark cheeks 
and jaw. His manners were pleasant. He spoke in a clipped, singing accent, softly. 
He and Onyx talked, and Alder listened for a good while to them. His mind drifted when they spoke 
about people and matters of which he knew nothing. He looked out over the roofs and awnings, the roof 
gardens and the arched and carven bridges, northward to Mount Onn, a great pale-grey dome above the 
hazy hills of summer. He came back to him-self hearing the Pelnish wizard say, �It may be that even the 
Archmage could not wholly heal the wound in the world.� 
The wound in the world, Alder thought: yes. He looked more intently at Seppel, and Seppel glanced at 
him. For all the soft look of the man his eyes were sharp. 
�Maybe it�s not only our desire to live forever that has kept the wound open,� Seppel said, �but the 
desire of the dead to die.� 
Again Alder heard the strange words and felt that he recognised them without understanding them. 
Again Seppel glanced at him as if seeking a response. 
Alder said nothing, nor did Onyx speak. Seppel said at last, �When you stand at the bourne, Master 
Alder, what is it they ask of you?� 
�To be free,� Alder replied, his voice only a whisper. 
�Free,� Onyx murmured. 
Silence again. Two girls and a boy ran past across the roofway, laughing and calling, �Down at the 
next!�-playing one of the endless games of chase children made with their city�s maze of streets and 
canals and stairs and bridges. 
�Maybe it was a bad bargain from the beginning,� Seppel said, and when Onyx looked a question at him 
he said, �Verw nadan.� 
Alder knew the words were in the Old Speech, but he did not know their meaning. 
He looked at Onyx, whose face was very grave. Onyx said only, �Well, I hope we can come to the truth 
of these things, and soon. 
�On the hill where truth is,� Seppel said. 
�I�m glad you�ll be with us there. Meanwhile, here is Alder summoned to the bourne night after night 

and seeking some reprieve. I said that you might know a way to help km.� 
�And you would accept the touch of the wizardry of Pain?� Seppel asked Alder. His tone was softly 
ironic. His eyes were bright and hard as jet. 
Alder�s lips were dry. �Master,� he said, �we say on my is-land, the man drowning doesn�t ask what the 
rope cost. If you can keep me from that place even for a night, you�ll have my heart�s thanks, little as 
that is worth in return for such a gift.� 
Onyx looked at him with a slight, amused, unreproving smile. 
Seppel did not smile at all. �Thanks are rare, in my trade,� he said. �I would do a good deal for them. I 
think I 
i68 
not by your own will, 
little time. �It�s Alders face and 
to tell you the rope is 
can help you, Master Alder. But I have 
a costly one.� 
Alder bowed his head. 
�You come to the bourne in dream, 
that is so?� 
�So I believe.� 
�Wisely said.� Seppel�s keen glance approved him. �Who knows his own will clearly? But if it is in 
dream you go there, I can keep you from that dream-for a while. And at a cost, as I said.� 
Alder looked his question 
�Your power. 
Alder did not understand him at first. Then he said, �My gift, you mean? My art?� 
Seppel nodded. 
�I�m only a mender,� Alder said after a 
not a great power to give up.� 

Onyx made as if to protest, but looked at 
said nothing. 
�It is your living,� Seppel said. 
�It was my life, once. But that�s gone.� 
�Maybe your gift will come back to you, when what must happen has happened. I cannot promise that. I 
will try to re-store what I can of what I take from you. But we�re all walk-ing in the night, now, on 
ground we don�t know. When the day comes we may know where we are, or we may not. Now, if I 
spare you your dream, at that price, will you thank me?� 
�I will,� Alder said. �What�s the little good of my gift, against the great evil my ignorance could do? If 
you spare me the fear I live in now, the fear that I may do that evil, I�ll thank you till the end of my life.� 
Seppel drew a deep breath. �I�ve always heard that the harps of Taon play true,� he said. He looked at 
Onyx. �And Roke has no objection?� he asked, with a return to his mild ironic tone. 
Onyx shook his head, but he now looked very grave. 
�Then we will go to the cave at Aumn. Tonight if you like.� 
�Why there?� Onyx asked. 
�Because it�s not I but the Earth that will help Alder. Aurun is a sacred place, hill of power. Although 
the people of Havnor have forgotten that, and use it only to defile it.� 
Onyx managed to have a private word with Alder before they followed Seppel downstairs. �You need 
not go through with this, Alder;� he said. �I thought I trusted Seppel, but I don�t know, now. 
�I�ll trust him,� Alder said. He understood Onyx�s doubts, but he had meant what he said, that he would 
do anything to be free of the fear of doing some dreadful wrong. Each time he had been drawn back in 
dream to that wall of stones, he felt that something was trying to come into the world through him, that it 
would do so if he listened to the dead calling to him, and each time he heard them, he was weaker and it 
was harder to resist their call. 
The three men went a long way though the city streets in the heat of the late afternoon. They came out 
into the countryside south of the city, where rough ridgy hills ran down to the bay, a poor bit of country 
for this rich island: 
swampy lowland between the ridges, a little arable land on 
their rocky backs. The wall of the city here was very old, built of great unmortared rocks taken from the 
hills, and be-yond it were no suburbs and few farms. 
They walked along a rough road that zigzagged up the first ridge and followed its crest eastward towards 
the higher hills. Up there, where they could see all the city lying in a golden haze northward, to their left, 
the road widened out into a maze of footpaths. Going straight forward they came suddenly to a great 
crack in the ground, a black gap twenty feet wide or more, right across their way. 
It was as if the spine of rock had been cracked apart by a wrenching of the earth and had never healed 
again. The western sunlight streaming over the lips of the cave lighted the vertical rock faces a little way 
down, but below that was darkness. 
There was a tannery in the valley under the ridge, south of it. The tanners had brought their wastes up 
here and dumped them into the crack, carelessly; so that all around it was a litter of rancid scraps of halfcured 
leather and a stink of rot and urine. There was another smell from the depths of the cave as they 
approached the sheer edge: a cold, sharp, earthy air that made Alder draw back. 
�I grieve for this, I grieve for this!� the wizard of Paln said aloud, looking around at the rubbish and 
down at the roofs of the tannery with a strange expression. But he spoke to Alder after a while in his 

usual mild way: �This is the cave or cleft called Aurun, that we know from our most ancient maps in 
Pain, where it is also called the Lips of Paor. It used to speak to the people here, when they first came 
here from the west. A long time ago. Men have changed. But it is what it was then. Here you can lay 
down your burden, if that is what you want.~~ 
�What must I do?� Alder said. 
Seppel led him to the south end of the great split in the ground, where it narrowed back together in 
fissured ridges of rock. He told him to lie facedown where he could gaze into the depth of darkness 
stretching down and down away from him. �Hold to the earth,� he said. �That is all you must do. Even if 
it moves, hold to it.� 
Alder lay there staring down between the walls of stone. He felt rocks jabbing his chest and hip as he lay 
on them; he heard Seppel begin to chant in a high voice in words he knew were the Language of the 
Making; he felt the warmth of the sun across his shoulders, and smelled the carrion stink of the tannery. 
Then the breath of the cave blew up out of the depths with a hollow sharpness that took his own breath 
away and made his head spin. The darkness moved up to-wards him. The ground moved under him, 
rocked and shook, and he held on to it, hearing the high voice sing, breathing the breath of the earth. The 
darkness rose up and took him. He lost the sun. 
When he came back, the sun was low in the west, a red ball in the haze over the western shores of the 
bay. He saw that. He saw Seppel sitting nearby on the ground, looking tired and forlorn, his black 
shadow long on the rocky ground among the long shadows of the rocks. 
�There you are,� Onyx said. 
Alder realised that he was lying on his back, his head on Onyx�s knees, a rock digging into his 
backbone. He sat up, dizzy, apologising. 
They set off as soon as he could walk, for they had some miles to go and it was clear that neither he nor 
Seppel would be able to keep a fast pace. Full night had fallen when they came by Boatwright Street. 
Seppel bade them farewell, look-ing searchingly at Alder as they stood in the light from a tav-ern door 
nearby. �I did as you asked me,� he said, with that same unhappy look. 
�I thank you for it,� Alder said, and put out his right hand to the wizard in the manner of the people of 
the En-lades. After a moment Seppel touched it with his hand; and so they parted. 
Alder was so tired he could barely make his legs move. The sharp, strange taste of the air from the cave 
was still in his mouth and throat, making him feel light, light-headed, hollow. When at last they came to 
the palace, Onyx wanted to see him to his room, but Alder said he was well and only needed to rest. 
He came into his room and Tug came dancing and tail- waving to greet him. �At, I don�t need you now,� 
Alder said, bending down to stroke the sleek grey back. Tears came into his eyes. It was only that he was 
very tired. He lay down on the bed, and the cat jumped up and curled up purring on his shoulder. 
And he slept: black, blank sleep with no dream he could remember, no voice calling his name, no bill of 
dry grass, no dim wall of stones, nothing. 
WALKING IN THE GARDENS of the palace in the evening before they were to sail south, Tenar was 
heavyhearted and anxious. She did not want to be setting off to Roke, the Isle of the Wise, the Isle of the 
Wizards. (Accursed-sorcerers, a voice in her mind said in Kargish.) What had she to do there? What 
possible use could she be? She wanted to go home to Gont, to Ged. To her own house, her own work, 
her own dear man. 

She had estranged Lebannen. She had lost him. He was polite, affable, and unforgiving. 
How men feared women! she thought, walking among the late-flowering roses. Not as individuals, but 
women when they talked together, worked together, spoke up for one another- then men saw plots, 
cabals, constraints, traps being laid. 
Of course they were right. Women were likely, as women, to take the next generation�s part, not this 
one�s; they wove the links men saw as chains, the bonds men saw as bondage. She and Seserakh were 
indeed in league against him and ready to betray him, if he tnily was nothing unless he was independent. 
If he was only air and fire, no weight of earth to him, no patient water... 
But that was not Lebannen so much as Tehanu. Un-earthly, her Therm, the winged soul that had come to 
stay with her a while and was soon, she knew, to leave her. From fire to fire. 
And Irian, with whom Tehanu would go. What had that bright, fierce creature to do with an old house 
that needed sweeping, an old man who needed looking after? How could Irian understand such things? 
What was it to her, a dragon, that a man should undertake his duty, marry, have children, wear the yoke 
of earth? 
Seeing herself alone and useless among beings of high, inhuman destiny, Tenar gave in altogether to 
homesickness. 
Homesickness not for Gont only. Why should she not be in league with Seserakh, who might be a 
princess as she herself had been a priestess, but who was not going to go flying off on fiery wings, being 
deeply and entirely a woman of the earth? And she spoke Tenar�s own language! Tenar had duti-frilly 
tutored her in Hardic, had been delighted with her quickness to learn, and realised only now that the true 
de-light had been just to speak Kargish with her, hearing and saying words that held in them all her lost 
childhood. 
As she came to the walk that led to the fish ponds be-neath the willows, she saw Alden With him was a 
small boy. They were talking quietly, soberly. She was always glad to see Alder. She pitied him for the 
pain and fear he was in and honored his patience in bearing it. She liked his honest, handsome face, and 
his silver tongue. What was the harm in adding a grace note or two to ordinary speech? Ged had trusted 
him. 
Pausing at a distance so as not to disturb the conversa-tion, she saw him and the child kneel down on the 
path, looking into the bushes. Presently Alder�s little grey cat emerged from under a bush. It paid no 
attention to them, but set off across the grass, paw by paw, belly low and eyes alight, hunting a moth. 
�You can let him stay out all night, if you like,� Alder said to the child. �He can�t stray or come to harm 
here. He has a great taste for the open air But this is like all Havnor to him, you see, these great gardens. 
Or you can give him his free-dom in the mornings. And then, if you like, he can sleep with you.� 
�I would like that,� the boy said, shyly decisive. 

�Then he needs his box of sand in your room, you know. And a bowl of drinking water, never to go dry� 
�And food.� 
�Yes, indeed; once a day. Not too much of it. He�s a bit greedy. Inclined to think Segoy made the islands 
so that Tug could fill his belly.� 
�Does he catch fish in the pond?� The cat was now near one of the carp pools, sitting on the grass 
looking about; the moth had flown. 
�He likes to watch them.� 
�I do too,� the boy said. They got up and walked together towards the pools. 
Tenar was moved to tenderness. There was an innocence to Alder, but it was a man�s innocence, not 
childish. He should have had children of his own. He would have been a good father to them. 
She thought of her own children, and of the little grand-children-though Apple�s eldest, Pippin, was it 
possible? was Pippin about to be twelve? She would be named this year or next! Oh, it was time to go 
home. It was time to visit Middle Valley, take a nameday present to her granddaughter and toys to the 
babies, make sure Spark in his restlessness wasrft overpruning the pear trees again, sit a while and talk 
with her kind daughter Apple... Apple�s true name was Hayohe, the name Ogion had given her... The 
thought of Ogion came as always with a pang of love and longing. She saw the hearthplace of the house 
at Re Albi. She saw Ged sitting there at the hearth. She saw him turn his dark face to ask her a question. 
She answered it, aloud, in the gardens of 
�76 
the New Palace of Havnor hundreds of miles from that hearth: �As soon as I can!� 
IN THE MORNING, the bright summer morning, they all went down from the palace to go aboard the 
Dolphin. The people of the City of Havnor made it a festival, swarming afoot in the streets and on the 
wharves, choking the canals with the little poled boats they called chips, dotting the great bay with 
sailboats and dinghies all flying bright flags; and flags and pennants flew from the towers of the great 
houses and the banner poles on bridges high and low. Pass-ing among these cheerfUl crowds, Tenar 
thought of the day long ago she and Ged came sailing into Havnor, bringing home the Rune of Peace, 
Elfarran�s Ring. That Ring had been on her arm, and she had held it up so the silver would flash in the 
sunlight and the people could see it, and they had cheered and held out their arms to her as if they all 
wanted to embrace her. It made her smile to think of that. She was smiling as she went up the gangplank 
and bowed to Lebannen. 
He greeted her with the traditional formality of a ship�s master: �Mistress Tenar, be welcome aboard.� 
She replied, moved by she knew not what impulse, �I thank you, son of Elfarran.� 
He looked at her for a moment, startled by that name. But Tehanu followed close after her, and he 
repeated the for-mal greeting: �Mistress Tehanu, be welcome aboard.� 
Tenar went on towards the prow of the ship, remember-ing a corner there near a capstan where a 
passenger could be out of the way of the hardworking sailors and yet see all that happened on the 
crowded deck and outside the ship too. 
There was a commotion in the main street leading to the dock the High Princess was arriving. Tenar saw 
with satisfac-don that Lebannen, or perhaps his majordomo, had arranged for the princess�s arrival to be 
fittingly magnificent. Mounted escorts opened a way through the crowds, their horses snort-ing and 

clattering in fine style. Tall red plumes, such as Kar-gish warriors wore on their helmets, waved from the 
top of the closed, gilt-bedizened carriage that had brought the princess across the city and on the 
headstalls of the four grey horses that drew it. A band of musicians waiting on the waterside struck up 
with trumpet, tambour, and tambourine. And the people, discovering that they had a princess to cheer 
and peer at, cheered loudly, and pressed as dose as the horsemen and foot guards would allow them, 
gaping and fUll of praises and somewhat random greetings. �Hail the Queen of the Kargs!� some of 
them shouted, and others, �She ain�t,� and others, �Look at �em all in red, fine as rubies, which one is 
her?� and others, �Long live the Princess!� 
Tenar saw Seserakh-veiled of course from hat to foot, but unmistakable by her height and bearingdescend 
from the carriage and sail, stately as a ship herseW towards the gangplank. Two of her shorterveiled 
attendants trotted close behind her, followed by Lady Opal of Then. Tenar�s heart sank. Lebannen 
had decreed that no servants or fol-lowers were to be taken on this journey. It was not a cruise or 
pleasure trip, he had said sternly, and those aboard must have good reason to be aboard. Had Seserakh 
not understood that? Or did she so cling to her silly countrywomen that she 
meant to defr the king? That would be a most unfortunate beginning of the voyage. 
But at the foot of the gangplank the gold-rippling red cylinder stopped and turned. It put forth hands, 
gold- skinned hands shining with gold rings. The princess em-braced her handmaidens, clearly bidding 
them farewell. She also embraced Lady Opal in the approved stately manner of royalty and nobility in 
public. Then Lady Opal herded the handmaidens back towards the carriage, while the princess turned 
again to the gangplank. 
There was a pause. Tenar could see that featureless col-umn of red and gold take a deep breath. It drew 
itself up taller. 
It proceeded up the gangplank, slowly, for the tide had been rising and the angle was steep, but with an 
unhesitant dignity that kept the crowds ashore silent, fascinated, watching. 
It attained the deck and stopped there, facing the king. 
�High Princess of the Kargad Lands, be welcome aboard,� Lebannen said in a ringing voice. At that the 
crowds burst out-�Hurrah for the Princess! Long live the Queen! Well walked, Reddy!� 
Lebannen said something to the princess which the cheering made inaudible to others. The red column 
turned to the crowd on the waterside and bowed, stiff-backed but gracious. 
Tehanu had waited for her near where the king stood, and now came forward and spoke to her and led 
her to the aft cabin of the ship, where the heavy, soft-flowing red and golden veils disappeared. The 
crowd cheered and called more wildly than ever. �Come back, Princess! Where�s Reddy? Where�s our 
lady? Where�s the Queen?� 
Tenar looked down the length of the ship at the king. Through her misgivings and heaviness of heart, 
unruly laughter welled up in hen She thought, Poor boy, what will you do now? They�ve fallen in love 
with her the first chance they got to see her, even though they can�t see her... Oh, Lebannen, we�re all in 
league against you! 
DOLPHIN WAS A FAIR-SIZED ship, fitted out to carry a king in some state and comfort; but first and 
foremost she was made to sail, to fly with the wind, to take him where he needed to go as quickly as 
could be. Accommodations were cramped enough when it was only the crew and officers, the king and a 

few companions aboard. On this voyage to Roke, accom-modations were jammed. The crew; to be sure, 
were in no more than usual discomfort, sleeping down in the three- foot-high kennel of the foreward 
hold; but the officers had to share one wretched black closet under the forecastle. As for the passengers, 
all four women were in what was nor-mally the king�s cabin, which ran the narrow width of the 
sterncastle of the ship, while the cabin beneath it, usually occupied by the ship�s master and one or two 
other officers, was shared by the king, the two wizards, the sorcerer, and Tosla. The probability of 
misery and bad temper was, Tenar thought, limitless. The first and most urgent probability, however, 
was that the High Princess was going to be sick. 
They were sailing down the Great Bay with the mildest following wind, the water calm, the ship gliding 
along like a swan on a pond; but Seserakh cowered on her bunk, crying 
out in despair whenever she looked out through her veils and caught sight of the sunny, peaceful vista of 
unexcited water, the mild white wake of the ship, through the broad stern windows. �It will go up and 
down,� she moaned in Kargish. 
�It is not going up and down at all,� Tenar said. �Use your head, princess!� 
�It is my stomach not my head,� Seserakh whimpered. 
�Nobody could possibly be seasick in this weather. You are simply afraid.� 
�Mother,� Tehanu protested, understanding the tone if not the words. �Don�t scold hen It�s miserable to 
be sick.� 
�She is not sick!� Tenar said. She was absolutely con-vinced of the truth of what she said. �Seserakh, 
you are not sick. You are afraid of being sick. Get hold of yourself. Come out on deck. Fresh air will 
make all the difference. Fresh air and courage.� 
�Oh my friend,� Seserakh murmured in Hardic. �Make me courage!� 
Tenar was a little taken aback. �You have to make it your-self, princess,� she said. Then, relenting, 
�Come on, just try it out on deck for a minute. Tehanu, see if you can persuade her. Think what she�ll 
suffer if we do meet some weather!� 
Between them they got Seserakh to her feet and into her cylinder of red veiling, without which she could 
not of course appear before the eyes of men; they coaxed and wheedled her to creep out of the cabin, 
onto the bit of deck to the side of it, in the shade, where they could all sit in a row on the bone- white, 
impeccable decking and look out at the blue and shin-ing sea. 
Seserakh parted her veils enough that she could see straight in front of her; but she mostly looked at her 
lap, with an occasional, brief, terrified glance at the water, after which she shut her eyes and then looked 
down at her lap again. 
Tenax and Tehanu talked a little, pointing out ships that passed, birds, an island. �It�s lovely. I forgot 

how I like to sail!� Tenar said. 
�I like it if I can forget the water,� said Tehanu. �It�s like flying.� 
tAh, you dragons,� Tenar said. 
It was spoken lightly, but it was not lightly said. It was the first time she had ever said anything of the 
kind to her adopted daughten She was aware that Tehanu had turned her head to look at her with her 
seeing eye. Tenar�s heart beat heavily. �Air and fire,� she said. 
Tehanu said nothing. But her hand, the brown slender hand, not the claw, reached out and took hold of 
Tenar�s hand and held it tightly 
�I don�t know what I am, mother,� she whispered in her voice that was seldom more than a whispen 
�I do,� Tenar said. And her heart beat heavier and harder than before. 
�I�m not like Irian,� Tehanu said. She was trying to com-fort her mother, to reassure her, but there was 
longing in her voice, yearning jealousy profound desire. 
�Wait, wait and find out,� her mother replied, finding it hard to speak. �You�ll know what to do ... what 
you are... when the time comes. 
They were talking so softly that the princess could not hear what they said, if she could understand it. 
They had for-gotten her. But she had caught the name Irian, and parting 
her veils with her long hands and turning to them, her eyes looking out bright from the warm red 
shadow, she asked, �Irian, she is?� 
�Somewhere forward-up there--� Tenar waved at the rest of the ship. 
�She makes herself courage. Ah?� 
After a moment Tenar said, �She doesn�t need to make it, I think. She�s fearless.� 
�Ah,� said the princess. 
Her bright eyes were gazing out of shadow all the length of the ship, to the prow, where Jrian stood 
beside Lebannen. The king was pointing ahead, gesturing, talking with anima-tion. He laughed, and 
Irian, standing by him, as tall as he, laughed too. 
�Barefaced,� Seserakh muttered in Kargish. And then in Hardic, thoughtfi].lly, almost inaudibly 
�Fearless.� 
She closed her veils and sat featureless, unmoving. 
THE LONG SHORES OF Havnor were blue behind them. Mount Onn floated faint and high in the 
north. The black basalt columns of the Isle of Omer towered off the ship�s right side as she worked 
across the Ebavnor Straits towards the In-most Sea. The sun was bright, the wind fresh, another fine day. 
All the women were sifting under the sailcloth awning the sailors had rigged for them beside the 
aftercabin. Women brought good luck to a ship, and the sailors couldn�t do enough for them in the way 
of ingenious little comforts and amenities. Because wizards could bring good luck or, equally, bad luck 
to a ship, the sailors also treated the wizards very well; their awning was rigged in a corner of the 
quarterdeck, where they had a good view forward. The women had velvet cushions to sit on (provided 
by the king�s forethought, or his majordomo�s); the wizards had packets of sailcloth, which did very 
well. 
Alder found himself treated as and considered to be one of the wizards. He could do nothing about it, 
though it em-barrassed him lest Onyx and Seppel should think he was claiming equality with them, and 
it also troubled him because he was now not even a sorcerer. His gift was gone. He had no power at all. 
He knew it as surely as he would have known the loss of his sight, the paralysis of his hand. He could 

not have mended a broken pitcher now, unless with glue; and he would have done it badly, because he 
had never had to do it. 
And beyond the craft he had lost was something else, something larger than the craft, that was gone. Its 
loss left him, as his wife�s death had, in a blankness in which no joy, no new thing was or would ever be. 
Nothing could happen, nothing could change. 
Not having known of this larger aspect of his gift till he lost it, he pondered on it, wondering about its 
nature. It was like knowing the way to go, he thought, like knowing the di-rection of home. Not a thing 
one could identifr or even say much about, but a connection on which everything else de-pended. 
Without it he was desolate. He was useless. 
But at least he did no harm. His dreams were fleeting, meaningless. They never took him to those dreary 
moor- lands, the hill of dead grass, the wall. No voices called him to the dark. 
He thought often of Sparrowhawk, wishing he could talk with him: the Archmage who had spent all his 
power, and 
having been great among the great, now lived his life out poor and disregarded. Yet the king longed to 
show him honor; so Sparrowhawk�s poverty was by choice. Perhaps, Alder thought, riches or high estate 
would have been only shamefiil to a man who had lost his true wealth, his way 
Onyx clearly regretted having led Alder to make this trade or bargain. He had always been entirely civil 
to Alder, but he now treated him with regard and compunction, while his manner to the wizard of Pain 
had become a little distant. Alder himself felt no resentment towards Seppel and no distrust of his 
intentions. The Old Powers were the Old Powers. You used them at your risk. Seppel had told him what 
he must pay, and he had paid it. He had not under-stood quite how much there was to pay; but that was 
not Seppel�s fault. It was his own, for never having valued his gift at its true worth. 
So he sat with the two wizards, thinking of himself as false coin to their gold, but listening to them with 
all his mind; for they trusted him and spoke freely, and their talk was an education he had never dreamed 
of as a sorcerer. 
Sitting there in the bright pale shade of the canvas awning, they talked of a bargain, a greater bargain 
than the one he had made to stop his dreams. Onyx said more than once the words of the Old Speech 
Seppel had spoken on the rooftop: Verw nadan. As they talked, little by little Alder gathered that the 
meaning of those words was something like a choice, a division, making two things of one. Far, far back 
in time, before the Kings of Enlad, before the writing of Hardic, maybe before there was a Hardic 
tongue, when there was only the Language of the Making, it seemed that people had made some kind of 
choice, given up one great power or possession to gain another. 
The wizards� talk of this was hard to follow, not so much because they hid anything but because they 
themselves were groping after things lost in the cloudy past, the time before memory Words of the Old 
Speech came into their talk of necessity, and sometimes Onyx spoke entirely in that tongue. But Seppel 
would answer him in Hardic. Seppel was sparing with the words of the Making. Once he held up his 
hand to stop Onyx from going on, and at the Roke wizard�s look of surprise and question, said mildly, 
�Spellwords act.� 
Alder�s teacher Gannet, too, had called the words of the Old Speech spellwords. �Each is a deed of 
power,� he had said. �True word makes truth be.� Gannet had been stingy with the spellwords he knew, 
speaking them only at need, and when he wrote any rune but the common ones that were used to write 
Hardic, he erased it almost as he finished it. Most sorcerers were similarly careful, either to guard their 
knowledge for themselves or because they respected the power of the Language of the Making. Even 

Seppel, wizard as he was, with a far wider knowledge and understanding of those words, preferred not to 
use them in conversation, but to keep to ordinary language which, if it allowed lies and er-rors, also 
permitted uncertainty and retraction. 
Perhaps that had been part of the great choice men made in ancient times: to give up the innate 
knowledge of the Old Speech, which they once shared with the dragons. Had they done so, Alder 
wondered, in order to have a language of their own, a language suited to mankind, in which they could 
lie, 
cheat, swindle, and invent wonders that never had been and would never be? 
The dragons spoke no speech but the Old Speech. Yet it was always said that dragons lied. Was it so? he 
wondered. If spellwords were true, how could even a dragon use them to lie? 
Seppel and Onyx had come to one of the long, easy, thoughtftil pauses in their conversation. Seeing that 
Onyx was, in fact, at least haff asleep, Alder asked the Pelnish wiz-ard softly, �Is it true that dragons can 
tell untruth in the true words?� 
The Pelnishman smiled. �That-so we say on Paln-is the very question Ath asked Orm a thousand years 
ago, in the ruins of Ontuego. �Can a dragon lie?� the mage asked. And Orm replied, �No,� and then 
breathed on him, burning him to ashes... But are we to believe the story since it was only Qrm who 
could have told it?� 
Infinite are the arguments of mages, Alder said to himself, but not aloud. 
Onyx had gone definitely to sleep, his head tilted back against the bulkhead, his grave, tense face 
relaxed. 
Seppel spoke, his voice even quieter than usual. �Alder, I hope you do not regret what we did at Aurun. I 
know our friend thinks I did not warn you clearly enough.� 
Alder said without hesitation, �I am content.� 
Seppel inclined his dark head. 
Alder said presently, �I know that we try to keep the Equilibrium. But the Powers of the Earth keep their 
own account.� 
�And theirs is a justice that is hard for men to understand.� 
�That�s it. I try to see why it was just that, my craft, I mean, that I must give up to free myself from that 
dream. What has the one to do with the other?� 
Seppel did not answer for a while, and then it was with a question. �It was not by your craft that you 
came to the wall of stones?� 
�Never,� Alder said with certainty �I had no more power to go there if I willed it than I had to prevent 
myself from going.� 
�So how did you come there?� 
�My wife called me, and my heart went to hen� 
Alonger pause. The wizard said, �Other men have lost beloved wives.� 
�So I said to my Lord Sparrowhawk. And he said: that�s true, and yet the bond between true lovers is as 
close as we come to what endures forever.� 
�Across the wall of stones, no bond endures.� 
Alder looked at the wizard, the swarthy, soft, keen-eyed face. �Why is it so?� he said. 
�Death is the bond breaken� 
�Then why do the dead not die?� 
Seppel stared at him, taken aback. 

�I�m sorry,� Alder said. �I misspeak in my ignorance. What I mean is this: death breaks the bond of soul 
with body, and the body dies. It goes back to the earth. But the spirit must go to that dark place, and 
wear a semblance of the body, and endure there-for how long? Forever? In the dust and dusk there, 
without light, or love, or cheer at all? I cannot 
bear to think of Lily in that place. Why must she be there? Why can she not be-� his voice stumbled-�be 
free?� 
�Because the wind does not blow there,� Seppel said. His look was very strange, his voice harsh. �It was 
stopped from blowing, by the art of man. 
He continued to stare at Alder but only gradually did he begin to see him. The expression in his eyes and 
face changed. He looked away, up the beautiful white curve of the foresail, frll of the breath of the 
northwest wind. He glanced back at Alder. �You know as much as I do of this matter; my friend,� he 
said with almost his usual softness. �But you know it in your body, your blood, in the pulse of your 
heart. And I know only words. Old words ... So we had better get to Roke, where maybe the wise men 
will be able to tell us what we need to know. Or if they cannot, the drag-ons will, perhaps. Or maybe it 
will be you who shows us the way 
�That would be the blind man who led the seers to the cliff�s edge, indeed!� Alder said with a laugh. 
�Ah, but we�re at the cliff�s edge akeady, with our eyes shut,� said the wizard of Paln. 
LEBANNEN FOUND THE SHIP too small to contain the enor-mous restlessness that filled him. The 
women sat under their little awning and the wizards sat under theirs like ducks in a row, but he paced up 
and down, impatient with the narrow confines of the deck. He felt it was his impatience and not the wind 
that sent Dolphin running so fast to the south, but never fast enough. He wanted the journey over. 
�Remember the fleet on the way to Wathort?� Tosla said, joining him while he stood near the steersman, 
studying the chart and the clear sea before them. �That was a grand sight. Thirty ships aline!� 
�I wish it was Wathort we were bound for,� Lebannen said. 
�I never did like Roke,� Tosla agreed. �Not an honest wind or current for twenty miles off that shore, 
but only wiz-ards� brew. And the rocks north of it never in the same place twice. And the town hill of 
cheats and shape-shifters.� He spat, competently, to leeward. �I�d rather meet old Gore and his slavers 
again!� 
Lebannen nodded, but said nothing. That was often the pleasure of Tosl&s company: he said what 
Lebannen felt it was better that he himself not say. 
�Who was the dumb man, the mute,� Tosla asked, �the one that killed Falcon on the wall?� 
�Egre. Pirate turned slave taker.� 
�That�s it. He knew you, there at Sorra. Went right for you. I always wondered how.� 
�Because he took me as a slave once. 
It was not easy to surprise Tosla, but the seaman looked at him with his mouth open, evidently not 
believing him but not able to say so, and so with nothing to say. Lebannen en-joyed the effect for a 
minute and then took pity on him. 
�When the Archmage took me hunting after Cob, we went south, first. A man in Hort Town betrayed us 
to the slave takers. They knocked the Archmage on the head, and I ran off thinking I could lead them 
away from him. But it was me they were after-I was salable. I woke up chained in a 
galley bound for Sowl. He rescued me before the next night passed. The irons fell off us all like bits of 
dead leaves. And he told Egre not to speak again until he found something worth saying... He came to 

that galley like a great light over the water... I never knew what he was till then.� 
Tosla mulled this over a while. �He unchained all the slaves? Why didn�t the others kill Egre?� 
�Maybe they took him on to Sowl and sold him,� Leban-nen said. 
Tosla mulled a while longer. �So that�s why you were so keen to do away with the slave trade.� 
�One reason. 
�Doesn�t improve the character, as a rule,� Tosla ob-served. He studied the chart of the Inmost Sea 
tacked on the board to the steersman�s left. �Island of Way,� he remarked. 
�Where the dragon woman�s from.� 
�You keep clear of her, I notice.� 
Tosla pursed his lips, though he aboard ship. �You know that song I Lass of Belilo? Well, I never 
thought tale. Until I saw her.� 
�I doubt she�d eat you, Tosla.� 
�It would be a glorious death,~~ 
did not whistle, being mentioned, about the of it as anything but a 
the sailor said, rather 
sourly. 
The king laughed. 
�Don�t push your own luck,� said Tosla. 
�No fear.� 
�You and she were talking there so free and easy. Like making yourself easy with a volcano, to my 
mind... But I�ll tell you, I wouldnk mind seeing a bit more of that present the Kargs sent you. There�s a 
sight worth seeing in there, to judge by the feet. But how do you get it out of the tent? The feet are 
grand, but I�d like a bit more ankle, to begin with.� 
Lebannen felt his face turn grim, and turned aside to keep Tosla from seeing it. 
�If anybody gave me a package like that,� Tosla said, staring out over the sea, �I�d open it.� 
Lebannen could not restrain a slight movement of impa-tience. Tosla saw it; he was quick. He grinned 
his wry grin and said no more. 
The ship�s master had come out on deck, and Lebannen engaged him in talk. �Looks a bit thick ahead?� 
he said, and the master nodded: �Thunder squalls to the south and west there. We�ll be in them tonight.� 
The sea grew choppier as the afternoon drew on, the be-nign sunlight took on a brassy tinge, and gusts 
of wind blew from one quarter then another. Tenar had told Lebannen that the princess was afraid of the 
sea and of seasickness, and he glanced back once or twice at the aftercabin, expect-ing to see no redveiled 
form among the ducks in a row. But it was Tenar and Tehanu who had gone in; the princess was 
still there, and Irian was sifting beside her. They were talk-ing earnestly. What on earth did a dragon 
woman from Way have to talk about with a harem woman from Hur-at-Hur? What language had they in 
common? The question seemed so much in need of answering to Lebannen that he walked aft. 
When he got there Irian looked up at him and smiled. She had a strong, open face, a broad smile; she 
went barefoot by choice, was careless about her dress, let the wind tangle 
her hair; altogether she seemed no more than a handsome, hot-hearted, intelligent, untaught 
countrywoman, till you saw her eyes. They were the color of smoky amber, and when she looked 
straight at Lebannen, as she was doing now, he could not meet them. He looked down. 

He had made it clear that there was to be no courtly cer-emony on the ship, no bows and courtesies, 
nobody was to leap up when he came near; but the princess had got to her feet. They were, as Tosla had 
observed, beautiful feet, not small, but high-arched, strong, and fine. He looked at them, the two slender 
feet on the white wood of the deck He looked up from them and saw that the princess was doing as she 
had done the last time he faced her: parting her veils so that he, though no one else, could see her face. 
He was a little staggered by the stern, almost tragic beauty of the face in that red shadow. 
�Is-is everything all right, princess?� he asked, stam-mering, a thing he very seldom did. 
She said, �My friend Tenar said, breathe wind.� 
�Yes� he said, rather at random. 
�Is there anything your wizards could do for her, do you think, maybe?� said Irian, unfolding her long 
limbs and standing up too. She and the princess were both tall women. 
Lebannen was trying to make out what color the prin-cess�s eyes were, since he was able to look at 
them. They were blue, he thought, but like blue opals they held other colors in them, or maybe it was the 
sunlight coming through the red of her veils. -�Do for her?� 
�She wants very much not to be seasick. She had a ter-rible time of it coming from the Kargish places.� 
�I will not to fear,� the princess said. She gazed straight at him as if challenging him to-what? 
�Of course,� he said, �of course. I�ll ask Onyx. I�m sure there�s something he can do.� He made a 
sketchy bow to them both and went off hurriedly to find the wizard. 
Onyx and Seppel conferred and then consulted Alder. A spell against seasickness was more in the 
province of sorcer-ers, menders, healers, than of learned and powerful wizards. Alder could not do 
anything himself at present, of course, but he might remember a ch~m...? He did not, having never 
dreamed of going to sea until his troubles began. Seppel con-fessed that he himself always got seasick in 
small boats or rough weather. Onyx finally went to the aftercabin and begged the princess�s pardon: he 
himself had no skill to help her, and noting to offer her but-apologetically-a charm or talisman one of the 
sailors heating of her plight-the sailors heard everything-had pressed upon him to give her. 
The princess�s long-fingered hand emerged from the -red and gold veils. The wizard placed in it a queer 
little black- and-white object: dried seaweed braided round a bird�s breastbone. �A petrel, because they 
ride the storm,� Onyx said, shamefaced. 
The princess bowed her unseen head and murmured thanks in Kargish. The fetish disappeared within her 
veils. She withdrew to the cabin. Onyx, meeting the king quite nearby, apologised to him. The ship was 
pitching energeti-cally now in hard, erratic gusts on a choppy sea, and he said, �I could, you know, sire, 
say a word to the winds.. 
Lebannen knew well that there were two schools of thought concerning weatherworking: the oldfashioned 
one, that of the Bagmen who ordered the winds to serve their ships as shepherds order their 
dogs to run here and there, and the newfangled notion-a few centuries old at most- of the Roke School, 
that the magewind might be raised at real need, but it was best to let the world�s winds blow. He knew 
that Onyx was a devout upholder of the way of Roke. �Use your own judgment, Onyx,� he said. �If it 
seems were in for a really bad night. . . But if it�s no more than a few squalls .. 
Onyx looked up at the masthead, where already a wisp or two of fallow fire had flickered in the clouddarkened 
dusk. Thunder rumbled grandly in the blackness before them, all across the south. Behind 
them the last of the daylight fell wan, tremulous across the waves. �Very well,� he said, rather dismally, 
and went below to the small and crowded cabin. 
Lebannen stayed out of that cabin almost entirely, sleep-ing on deck when he slept at all. Tonight was 

not one for sleep for anybody on the Dolphin. It was not a single squall, but a chain of violent latesummer 
storms boiling up out of the southwest, and between the terrific commotion of the lightningdazzled 
sea, the thunder crashes that seemed about to knock the ship apart, and the crazy storm gusts 
that kept her pitching and rolling and taking queer jumps, it was a long night and a loud one. 
Onyx consulted Lebannen once: Should he say a word to the wind? Lebannen looked to the master, who 
shrugged. He and his crew were busy enough, but unconcerned. The ship was in no trouble. As for the 
womenfolk, they were reported to be sitting up in their cabin, gambling. lrian and the princess had come 
out on deck earlier, but it was hard to stay afoot at times and they had seen they were in the crews way, 
so they had retired. The report that they were gambling came from the cook�s boy, who had been sent to 
see if they wanted anything to eat. They had wanted whatever he could bring. 
Lebannen found himself possessed by the same intense curiosity he had felt in the afternoon. There was 
no doubt the iamps were all alight in the stern cabin, for the glow of them streamed out golden on the 
foam and race of the ship�s wake. About midnight, he went aft and knocked. 
Irian opened the door. After the dazzle and blackness of the storm the lamplight in the cabin seemed 
warm and steady, though the swinging lamps cast swinging shadows; and he was confusedly aware of 
colors, the soft, various col-ors of the women�s clothes, their skin, brown or pale or gold, their hair, 
black or grey or tawny, their eyes-the princess s eyes staring at him, startled, as she snatched up a scarf 
or some cloth to hold before her face. 
�Oh! We thought it was the cook�s boy!� Trian said with a laugh. 
Tehanu looked at him and said in her shy, comradely way, �Is there trouble?� 
He realised that he was standing in the doorway staring at them like some speechless messenger of doom. 
�No- None at all- Are you getting on all right? I�m sorry it�s been so rough-� 
�We don�t hold you answerable for the weather,� Tenar 
said. �Nobody could sleep, so the princess and I have been teaching the others Kargish gambling.� 
He saw five-sided ivory dice-sticks scattered over the table, probably Tosla�s. 
�We�ve been betting islands,� Irian said. �But Tehanu and I are losing. The Kargs have already won Ark 
and Then.� 
The princess had lowered the scarf; she sat facing Lebannen resolutely, extremely tense, as a young 
swordsman might face him before a fencing match. In the warmth of the cabin they were all bare-armed 
and barefoot, but her con-sciousness of her uncovered face drew his consciousness as a magnet draws a 
pin. 
�I�m sorry it�s been so rough,� he said again, idiotically, and closed the door. As he turned away he 
heard them all laughing. 
He went to stand by the steersman. Looking into the gusty, rainy darkness lit by fitful, distant lightning, 
he could still see everything in the stern cabin, the black fall of Tehanu�s hair, Tenar�s affectionate, 
teasing smile, the dice on the table, the princess s round arms, honey-colored like the lamplight, her 
throat in the shadow of her hair, though he did not remember looking at her arms and throat but only at 
her face, at her eyes hill of defiance, despain What was the girl afraid of? Did she think he wanted to 
hurt her? 
Astar or two was shining out high in the south. He went to his crowded cabin, slung a hammock, for the 
bunks were fill, and slept for a few hours. He woke before dawn, restless as ever, and went up on deck. 
The day came as bright and calm as if no storm had ever been. Lebannen stood at the forward rail and 
saw the first sunlight strike across the water, and an old song came into his mind: 

o my joy! 
Before bright Ea was, before Segoy 
Bade the islands be, 
The morning wind blew on the sea. 
o my joy, be free! 
It was a fragment of a ballad or lullaby from his childhood. 
He could remember no more of it. The tune was sweet. 
He sang it softly and let the wind take the words from his lips. 
Tenar emerged from the cabin and, seeing him, came to him. �Good morning, my dear lord,� she said, 
and he greeted her fondly, with some memory that he had been angry at her hut not knowing why he had 
been or how he could have been. 
�Did you Kargs win Havnor last night?� he asked. 
�No, you may keep Havnor. We went to bed. All the young ones are still there, lolling. Shall we-what is 
it? lift Roke today?� 
�Raise Roke? No, not till early tomorrow. But before noon we should be in Thwil Harbor. If they let us 
come to the island.� 
�What do you mean?� 
�Roke defends itself from unwelcome visitors.� 
�Oh: Ged told me about that. He was on a ship trying to 
sail back there, and they sent the wind against him, the Roke wind he called it.� 
�Against him?� 
�It was a long time ago.� She smiled with pleasure at his incredulity, his unwillingness that any affront 
should ever have been offered to Ged. �When he was a boy who had meddled with the darkness. That�s 
what he said.� 
�When he was a man he still meddled with it.� 
�He doesn�t now,� Tenar said, serene. 
�No, it�s we who have to.� His face had grown somber. �I wish I knew what we�re meddling with. I am 
certain that things are drawing to some great chance or change-as Ogion foretold-as Ged told Alder. And 
I am certain that Roke is where we need to be to meet it. But beyond that, no certainty nothing. I don�t 
know what it is we face. When Ged took me into the dark land, we knew our enemy. When I took the 
fleet to Sorra, I knew what the evil was I wanted to undo. But now- Are the dragons our enemies or our 
al-lies? What has gone wrong? What is it we must do or undo? �Will the Masters of Roke be able to tell 
us? Or will they turn their wind against us?� 
�Fearing-?� 
�Fearing the dragon. The one they know. Or the one they don�t know... 
Tenar�s face was sober too, but gradually it broke into a smile. �What a ragbag you are bringing them, to 
be sure!� she said. �A sorcerer with nightmares, a wizard from Paln, two dragons, and two Kargs. The 
only respectable passen-gers on this ship are you and Onyx.� 
Lebannen could not laugh. �If only he were with us,� he said. 

Tenar put her hand on his arm. She started to speak and then did not. 
He laid his hand over hers. They stood silent thus for some time, side by side, looking out at the dancing 
sea. 
�The princess has something she wants to tell you be-fore we come to Roke,� Tenar said. �It�s a story 
from Hur-at-Hun Off there in their desert they remember things. I think this goes back before anything I 
ever heard except the story of the Woman of Kemay. It has to do with dragons... It would be kind of you 
to invite her, so that she doesn�t have to ask.� 
Aware of the care and caution with which she spoke, he felt a moment of impatience, a ffick of shame. 
He watched, far south across the sea, the course of a galley bound for Kamery or Way, the faint, tiny 
flash of the lifted sweeps. He said, �Of course. About noon?� 
�Thank you. 
ABOUT NOON, HE SENT a young seaman to the stern cabin to request the princess to join the king on 
the foredeck. She emerged at once, and the ship being only about fifty feet long, he could observe her 
entire progress towards him: not a long walk, though perhaps for her it was a long one. For it was not a 
featureless red cylinder that approached him but a tall young woman. She wore soft white trousers, a 
long shirt of dull red, a gold circlet that held a very thin red veil over her face and head. The veil 
fluttered in the sea wind. The young sailor led her round the various obstacles and up and 
down the descents and ascents of the crowded, cumbered, narrow deck. She walked slowly and proudly. 
She was bare-foot. Every eye in the ship was on her. 
She arrived on the foredeck and stood still. 
Lebannen bowed. �Your presence honors us, princess. 
She performed a deep, straight-backed courtesy and said, �Thank you.� 
�You were not ill last night, I hope?� 
She put her hand on the charm she wore on the cord round her neck, a small bone tied with black, 
showing it to him. �Kerez akath akatharwa erevi,� she said. He knew the word akath in Kargish meant 
sorcerer or sorcery 
There were eyes everywhere, eyes in hatchways, eyes up in the rigging, eyes that were like augurs, like 
gimlets. 
�Come forward, if you will. We may see Roke Island soon,� he said, though there was not the remotest 
chance of seeing a glimmer of Roke till dawn. With a hand under her elbow though not actually 
touching her, he guided her up the steep slant of the deck to the forepeak, where between a cap-stan, the 
slant of the bowsprit, and the port rail was a little triangle of decking that-when a sailor had scuffled 
away with the cable he was mending-they had quite to them-selves. They were as visible as ever to the 
rest of the ship, but they could turn their backs on it: as much privacy as royalty can hope fon 
When they had gained this tiny haven, the princess turned to him and pushed back the veil from her face. 
He had intended to ask what he could do for her, but the question seemed both inadequate and irrelevant. 
He said nothing. 
She said, �Lord King. In Hur-at-Hur I am feyagat. In Roke Island I am to be king�s daughter of Kargad. 
To be this, I am notfeyagat. I am bare face. If it please you. 
After a moment he said, �Yes. Yes, princess. This is- this is well done.~~ 
�It please you?� 
�Very much. Yes. I thank you, princess.� 

�Barrezg� she said, a regal acceptance of his thanks. Her dignity abashed him. Her face had been 
flaming red when she first put back the veil; there was no color in it now. But she stood straight and still, 
and gathered up her forces for another speech. 
�Too,� she said. �Also. My friend Tenar.� 
�Our friend Tenar,� he said with a smile. 
�Our friend Tenar. She says I am to tell King Lebannen of the Vedurnan.� 
He repeated the word. 
�Long ago long ago-Karg people, sorcery people, dragon people, hah? Yes?- All people one, all speak 
one- one- Oh! Wuluah tnekrevt!� 
�One language?� 
�Hah! Yes! One language!� In her passionate attempt to speak Hardic, to tell him what she wanted to tell 
him, she was losing her seW-consciousness; her face and eyes shone. �But then, dragon people say: Let 
go, let go all things. Fly!- But we people, we say: No, keep. Keep all things. Dwell!- So we go apart, 
hah? dragon people and we people? So they make the Vedurnan. These to let go-these to keep. Yes? But 
to keep all things, we must to let go that language. That dragon people language.� 
�The Old Speech?� 
�Yes! So we people, we let go that Old Speech language, and keep all things. And dragon people let go 
all things, but keep that, keep that language. Hah? Seyneha? This is the Ve-durnan.� Her beautiful, large, 
long hands gestured eloquently and she watched his face with eager hope of understanding. �We go east, 
east, east. Dragon people go west, west. We dwell, they fly. Some dragon come east with us, but not 
keep the language, forget, and forget to fly. Like Karg people. Karg people speak Karg language, not 
dragon language. All keep the Vedurnan, east, west. Seyneha? But in-� 
At a loss, she brought her hands together from her �east� and �west,� and Lebannen said, �In the 
middle?� 
�Hah, yes! In the middle!� She laughed with the pleasure of getting the word. �In the middle-you! 
Sorcery people! Hah? You, middle people, speak Hardic language but too, also, keep to speak Old 
Speech language. You learn it. Like I learn Hardic, hah? Learn to speak. Then, then-this is the bad. The 
bad thing. Then you say, in that sorcery language, in that Old Speech language, you say: We will not to 
die. And it is so. And the Vedurnan is broken.� 
Her eyes were like blue fire. 
After a moment she asked, �Seyneha?� 
�I�m not sure I understand.� 
�You keep life. You keep. Too long. You never to let go. But to die-� She threw her hands out in a great 
opening gesture as if she threw something away, into the air, across the water. 
He shook his head regretfully. 
�Ah,� she said. She thought a minute, but no words came. Defeated, she moved her hands palms down 
in a graceful pantomime of relinquishment. �I must to learn more words,� she said. 
�Princess, the Master Patterner of Roke, the Master of the Grove-� He watched her for comprehension, 
and began again. �On Roke Island, there is a man, a great mage, who is a Karg. You can tell him what 
you have told me - in your own language.� 
She listened intently and nodded. She said, �The friend of Irian. I will in my heart to talk to this man.� 
Her face was bright with the thought. 

That touched Lebannen. He said, �I�m sorry you have been lonely here, princess.� 
She looked at him, alert and luminous, but did not reply. 
�I hope, as time goes on-as you learn the language-� 
�I learn quick,� she said. He did not know if it was a statement or a prediction. 
They were looking straight at each other. 
She resumed her stately attitude and spoke formally, as she had at the beginning: �I thank you to listen, 
Lord King.� She dipped her head and shielded her eyes in a formal sign of respect and made the deep 
knee-bend courtesy again, speaking some formula in Kargish. 
�Please,� he said, �tell me what you said.� 
She paused, hesitated, thought, and replied, �Your- your, ah-small kings?-sons! Sons, your sons, let 
them to be dragons and kings of dragons. Hah?� She smiled radi-andy, let the veil fall over her face, 
backed away four steps, turned and departed, lithe and sure-footed down the length of the ship. 
Lebannen stood as if last night�s lightning had struck him at last. 

CHAPTER V 
Rejoining 
THE LAST NIGHT OF THE sea voyage was calm, warm, starless. Dolphin moved with a long, easy 
rocking over the smooth swells southward. It was easy to sleep, and the people slept, and sleeping 
dreamed. 
Alder dreamed of a little animal that came in the dark and touched his hand. He could not see what it 
was, and when he reached out to it, it was gone, lost. Again he felt the small, velvet muzzle touch his 
hand. He half roused, and the dream slipped from him, but the piercing ache of loss was in his heart. 
In the bunk below him, Seppel dreamed that he was in his own house in Ferao on Paln, reading an old 
lore-book from the Dark Time, content with his worlq but he was in-ternipted. Some�ne wanted to see 
him. �It will only take a minute,� he told himself, and went to speak to the caller. It was a woman; her 
hair was dark with a glint of red in it, her face was beautiful and full of trouble. �You must send him to 
me,� she said. �You will send him to me, won�t you?� He thought: I don�t know who she means, but I 
must pretend I do, and he said, �That will not be easy, you know.� At that the woman drew her hand 
back and he saw that she held a stone, a heavy stone. Startled, he thought she meant to throw it at him or 
strike him down with it, and recoiling from her, he woke in the darkness of the cabin. He lay lis-tening 
to the breathing of the other sleepers and the whisper of the sea along the ship�s side. 
In his bunk on the other side of the small cabin, Onyx lay on his back gazing into the dark; he thought 
his eyes were open, he thought he was awake, but he thought that many small, thin cords had been tied 
around his arms and legs and hands and head, and that all these cords ran out into the darkness, over 
land and sea, over the curve of the world: and the cords were drawing him, tugging him, so that he and 
the ship he was in and all its passengers were being pulled gently, gently to the place where the sea dried 
up, where the ship would go aground silently on blind sands. But he could not speak or do anything 
because the cords tied shut his jaws, his eyelids. 
Lebannen had come down to the cabin to sleep for a while, wanting to be fresh at dawn when they might 

raise Roke Island. He slept quickly and deeply, and his dreams fleeted and changed: a high green hill 
above the sea-a woman who smiled and, lifting her hand, showed him she could make the sun rise-a 
claimant in his court ofjustice in Havnor from whom he learned to his horror and shame that half the 
people of the kingdom were starving to death in locked rooms beneath houses-a child who cried out to 
him, �Come to me!� but he could not find the child- As he slept, his right hand held the rock in the little 
amulet bag at his throat, clenched it tight. 
In the deck cabin above these dreamers, the women dreamed. Seserakh walked up into the mountains, 
the beau-tifUl dear desert mountains of her home. But she was walk-ing on the forbidden way, the 
dragon path. Human feet must not walk that path, must not even cross it. The dust of it was smooth and 
warm under her bare soles, and though she knew she must not walk on it, she walked on, until she 
looked up and saw that the mountains were not those she knew, but were black, jagged precipices which 
she could never climb. Yet she must climb them. 
Irian flew joyous on the storm wind, but the storm sent loops of lightning up over her wings, drawing 
her down and down towards the clouds, and as she was pulled nearer and nearer she saw they were not 
clouds but black rocks, a black and jagged mountain range. Her wings were tied to her sides by cords of 
lightning, and she fell. 
Tehanu crawled through a tunnel deep underground. There was not enough air to breathe and the tunnel 
grew narrower as she crawled. She could not turn back But the glimmering roots of trees, growing down 
through the dirt into the tunnel, gave her handholds sometimes by which she could pull herself on into 
the dark. 
Tenar climbed up the steps of the Throne of the Name-less Ones in the sacred Place of Atuan. She was 
very small and the steps were very high, so that she could climb them only laboriously. But when she 
reached the fourth step she did not pause and turn around, as the priestesses had told her she must do. 
She went on. She climbed the next step, and the next, and the nat, in dust so thick it had obliterated the 
steps and she must feel for the levels where no foot had ever trodden. She went hastily, because behind 
the empty throne Ged had left something or lost something, something of great importance to myriads of 
people, and she had to find it. Only she did not know what it was. �A stone, a stone,� she told herself. 
But behind the throne, when she crawled there at last, was only dust, owls� droppings and dust. 
In the alcove of the Old Mage�s house on the Overfell of Gont, Ged dreamed that he was Archmage. He 
was talking with his friend Thorion as they walked the corridor of runes towards the meeting room of 
the Masters of the School. �I had no power at all,� he told Thorion earnestly, �for years and years.� The 
Summoner smiled and said, �That was only a dream, you know.� But Ged was troubled by the long 
black wings that trailed behind him through the corridor; he shrugged his shoulders, trying to lift the 
wings, but they dragged on the floor like empty sacks. �Do you have wings?� he asked Thorion, who 
said, �Oh, yes,� complacently, show-ing him how his wings were tied tight against his back and legs by 
many small, thin cords. �I am well yoked,� he said. 
Among the trees of the Immanent Grove on Roke Is-land, Azver the Patterner slept as he often did in 
summer in an open glade near the eastern edge of the wood, where he could look up and see the stars 
through the leaves. There his sleep was light, transparent, his mind moving from thought to dream and 
back, guided by the movements of the stars and leaves as they changed places in their dance. But tonight 
there were no stars, and the leaves hung still. He looked up 
into the lightless sky and saw through the clouds. In the high black sky were stars: small, bright, and 
still. They did not move. He knew there would be no sunrise.- He sat up then, awake, gazing into the 

faint, soft light that always hung in the aisles of the trees. His heart beat slow and hard. 
In the Great House the young men, sleeping, turned and cried out, dreaming that they must go fight an 
army on a plain of dust, but the warriors they must fight were old men, old women, weak, sick people, 
weeping children. 
The Masters of Roke dreamed that a ship was sailing to-wards them over the sea, heavy laden, low in the 
water. One dreamed that the freight of the ship was black rocks. An-other dreamed she carried burning 
fire. Another dreamed that her cargo was dreams. 
The seven masters who slept in the Great House woke, one and then another, in their stone sleeping 
cells, made a little werelight, and got up. They found the Doorkeeper al-ready afoot and waiting at the 
door. �The king will come,� he said with a smile, �at daybreak.� 
�R0KE KNOLL,� T05LA SAID, gazing forward at the far, faint, unmoving wave in the southwest 
above the twilit waves. Lebannen, standing beside him, said nothing. The cloud cover had dispersed, and 
the sky arched its pure uncolored dome over the great circle of the waters. 
The ship�s master joined them. �A fair dawn,� he said, whispering in the silence. 
The east brightened slowly to yellow. Lebannen glanced aft. Two of the women were afoot, standing at 
the rail out-side their cabin; tall women, barefoot, silent, gazing east. 
The top of the round green hill caught the sunlight first. It was broad daylight when they sailed in 
between the head-lands of Thwil Bay. Everyone aboard was on deck, watching. But still they spoke little 
and softly. 
The wind died down within the harbor. It was so still the water reflected the little town that rose above 
the bay and the walls of the Great House that rose above the town. The ship glided on slower still slowen 
Lebannen glanced at the ship�s master and at Onyx. The master nodded. The wizard moved his hands up 
and out-ward slowly in a spell and murmured a word. 
The ship glided on softly, not slowing until she came alongside the longest of the docks. Then the master 
spoke, and the great sail was furled while men aboard tossed the lines to men on the dock, shouting, and 
the silence was broken. 
There were people on the quay to welcome them, towns-folk gathering, and a group of young men from 
the School, among them a big, deep-chested, dark-skinned man who held a heavy staff that matched his 
own height. �Welcome to Roke, King of the Western Lands,� he said, coming forward as the gangplank 
was run out and made fast. �And welcome to all your company. 
The young men with him and all the townsfolk called out hail and greeting to the king, and Lebannen 
answered them merrily as he came down the gangplank. He greeted the Master Summoner, and they 
spoke a while. 
Those watching could see that despite his words of wel-come, the Master Summoner�s frowning gaze 
went to the ship again and again, to the women who stood at the rail, and that his answers did not satisfy 
the king. 
When Lebannen left him and came back up into the ship, Irian came forward to meet him. �Lord King,� 
she said, you may tell the masters that I don�t want to enter their house-this time. I wouldn�t enter it if 
they asked me. 
Lebannen�s face was extremely stern. �It is the Master Pat-terner who asks you to come to him, to the 
Grove,� he said. 
At that Irian laughed, radiant. �I knew he would,� she said. �And Tehanu will come with me.� 

�And my mother,� Tehanu whispered. 
He looked at Tenar; she nodded. 
�So be it,� he said. �And the rest of us will be lodged in the Great House, unless any of us prefer another 
place.� 
�By your leave, my lord,� Seppel said, �I too will ask the hospitality of the Master Patterner.� 
�Seppel, that�s not necessary,� Onyx said harshly. �Come with me to my house.� 
The Pelnish wizard made a little placating gesture. �No reflection on your friends, my friend,� he said. 
�But I have longed all my life to walk in the Immanent Grove. And I would be easier there.� 
�It may be that the doors of the Great House are shut to me, as they were before,� Alder said, hesitant; 
and now Onyx�s sallow face was red with shame. 
The princess�s veiled head had turned from face to face as she eagerly listened, trying to understand 
what was said. Now she spoke: �Please, my Lord King, I will to be with my friend Tenar? My friend 
Tehanu? And Irian? And to speak to that Karg?� 
Lebannen looked at them all, glanced back to the Master Summoner standing massively at the foot of 
the gangplank, and laughed. He spoke from the rail, in his clear, affable voice: �My people have been 
cooped up in ship�s cabins, Summoner, and it would seem they long for grass underfoot and leaves 
above their heads. If we all beg the Patterner to take us in, and he agrees, will you forgive our seeming 
slight to the hospitality of the Great House for a time at least?� 
After a pause the Summoner bowed stiffly. 
Ashort, stocky man had come up beside him on the dock, and was looking up smiling at Lebannen. He 
lifted his staff of silvery wood. 
�Sire,� he said, �I took you about the Great House once, a long time ago, and told you lies about 
everything.� 
�Gamble!� said Lebannen. They met midway on the gang-plank and embraced, and talking, went down 
onto the dock. 
Onyx was the first to follow; he greeted the Summoner gravely and with ceremony, then turned to the 
man called Gamble. �Are you Windkey now?� he demanded, and when Gamble laughed and said yes, 
he also embraced him, saying, �A master well made!� Taking Gamble a little aside, he talked with him, 
eager and frowning. 
Lebannen looked up to the ship to signal the others to come ashore, and as they came down one by one 
he intro-duced them to the two Masters of Roke, Brand the Sum-moner and Gamble the Windkey. 
On most islands of the Archipelago people did not touch palms in greeting as was the way of Enlad, but 
only bowed the head or held both palms open before the heart, as if in offering. When Irian and the 
Summoner met, neither bowed or made any gesture. They stood stiff with their hands at their sides. 
The princess made her deep, straight-backed courtesy. Tenar made the conventional gesture, and the 
Sum-moner returned it. 
�The Woman of Gont, the daughter of the Archmage, Tehanu,� Lebannen said. Tehanu dipped her head 
and made the conventional gesture. But the Master Summoner stared at he; gasped, and stepped back as 
if he had been struck. 
�Mistress Tehanu,� said Gamble quickly, coming for-ward between her and the Summoner, �we 
welcome you to Roke-for your father�s sake, and your mother�s, and your own. I hope your voyage was 
a pleasant one?� 
She looked at him in confusion, and ducked, hiding her face, rather than bowed; but she managed to 

whisper some kind of answer. 
Lebannen, his face a bronze mask of calm composure, said, �Yes, it was a good voyage, Gamble, though 
the end of it is still in doubt. Shall we walk up through the town, now, Tenar-Tehanu-Princess-Orm 
Irian?� He looked at each as he spoke, saying the last name withparticular clarity. 
He set off with Tenar, and the others followed. As Seser-akh came down the gangplank, she resolutely 
swept back the red veils from her face. 
Gamble walked with Onyx, Alder with Seppel. Tosla stayed with the ship. The last to leave the quay 
was Brand the Summoner, walking alone and heavily 
TENAR HAD ASKED GED about the Grove more than once, liking to hear him describe it. �It seems 
like any grove of trees, when you see it first. Not very large. The fields come right up to it on the north 
and east, and there are hills to the south and usually to the west... It looks like nothing much. But it 
draws your eye. And sometimes, from up on Roke Knoll, you can see that it�s a forest, going on and on. 
You try to make out where it ends, but you can�t. It goes off into the west.. . And when you walk in it, it 
seems ordinary again, though the trees are mostly a kind that grows only there. Tall, with brown trunks, 
something like an oak, something like a chestnut.� 
�What are they called?� 
Ged laughed. �Arhada, in the Old Speech. Trees.. . The trees of the Grove, in Hardic... Their leaves don�t 
all turn in autumn, but some at every season, so the foliage is always green with a gold light in it. Even 
on a dark day those trees seem to hold some sunlight. And in the night, it�s never quite dark under them. 
There�s a kind of glimmer in the leaves, like moonlight or starlight. Willows grow there, and oak, and 
fir, other kinds; but as you go deeper in, it�s more and more only the trees of the Grove. And the roots of 
those go down deeper than the island. Some are huge trees, some slender, but you don�t see many fallen, 
nor many saplings. They live a long, long time.� His voice had grown soft, dreamy. �You can walk and 
walk in their shadow, in their light, and never come to the end of them.� 
�But is Roke so large an island?� 
He looked at her peaceffihly, smiling. �The forests here on Gont Mountain are that forest,� he said. �All 
forests are. 
And now she saw the Grove. Following Lebannen, they had come up through the devious streets of 
Thwil Town, gathering a Rock of townsfolk and children come out to see and greet their king. These 
cheerful followers dropped away little by little as the travelers left the town on a lane between hedges 
and farms, which petered out into a footpath past the high, round hill, Roke Knoll. 
Ged had told her of the Knoll, too. There, he said, all magic is strong; there all things take their true 
nature. �There,� he said, �our wizardry and the Old Powers of the Earth meet, and are one.� 
The wind blew in the high, half-dry grass on the hill. A donkey colt galloped off stiff-legged across a 
stubble field, flicking and flirting its tail. Cattle walked in slow procession along a fence that crossed a 
little stream. And there were trees ahead, dark trees, shadowy 
They followed Lebannen through a stile and over a footbridge to a sunlit meadow at the edge of the 
wood. A small, decrepit house stood near the stream. Irian broke from their group, ran across the grass 
to the house, and pat-ted the door frame as one would pat and greet a beloved horse or dog after long 
absence. �Dear house!� she said. And turning to the others, smiling, �I lived here,� she said, �when I 
was Dragonfly.� 
She looked round, searching the eaves of the wood, and then ran forward again. �Azver!� she called. 

Aman had come out of the shadow of the trees into the sunlight. His hair shone in it like silver gilt. He 
stood still as Irian ran to him. He lifted his hands to her, and she caught them in hers. �I won�t burn you, 
I won�t burn you this time,� she was saying, laughing and crying, though without tears. �I�m keeping my 
fires out!� 
They drew each other close and stood face to face, and he said to her, �Daughter of Kalessin, welcome 
home.� 
�My sister is with me, Azver,� she said. 
He turned his face-a light-skinned, hard, Kargish face, Tenar saw-and looked straight at Tehanu. He 
came to her. He dropped on both his knees before hen �Hama Gondun!� he said, and again, �Daughter 
of Kalessin.� 
Tehanu stood motionless for a moment. Slowly she put out her hand to him-her right hand, the burnt 
hand, the claw. He took it, bowed his head, and kissed it. 
�My honor is that I was your prophet, Woman of Gont,� he said, with a kind of exulting tenderness. 
Then, rising, he turned at last to Lebannen, made his bow, and said, �My king, be welcome.� 
�It�s ajoy to me to see you again, Patterner! But I bring a crowd into your solitude.� 
�My solitude is crowded already,� said the Patternen �A few live souls might keep the balance.� 
His eyes, pale grey-blue-green, glanced round among them. He suddenly smiled, a smile of great 
warmth, surpris-ing on his hard face. �But here are women of my own people,� he said in Kargish, and 
came to Tenar and Seserakh, who stood side by side. 
�I am Tenar ofAtuan-ofGont,� she said. �With me is the High Princess of the Kargad Lands.� 
He made a proper bow. Seserakh made her stiff courtesy, but her words poured out, tumultuous, in 
Kargish-�Oh, Lord Priest, I�m glad you�re here! If it weren�t for my friend Tenar I would have gone 
mad, thinking nobody was left in the world that could talk like a human being except the idiot women 
they sent with me from Awabath-but I am learn-ing to speak as they do-and I am learning courage, 
Tenar is 
my friend and teacher- But last night I broke taboo! I broke taboo! Oh, Lord Priest, please tell me what I 
must do to atone! I walked on the Dragons� Way!� 
�But you were aboard the ship, princess,� said Tenar (�I dreamed,� Seserakh said, impatient), �and the 
Lord Pat-terner is not a priest but an-a sorcerer- �Princess,� said Azver the Patterner, �I think we�re all 
walking on the Dragons� Way. And all taboos may well be shaken or broken. Not only in dream. We�ll 
speak of this late; under the trees. Have no fear. But let me greet my friends, if you will?� 
Seserakh nodded regally, and he turned away to greet Alder and Onyx. 
The princess watched him. �He is a warrior,� she said to Tenar in Kargish, with satisfaction. �Not a 
priest. Priests have no friends.� 
They all moved on slowly and came under the shadow of the trees. 
Tenar looked up into the arcades and ogives of branches, the layers and galleries of leaves. She saw oaks 
and a big hemmen tree, but most were the trees of the Grove. Their oval leaves moved easily in the air, 
like the leaves of aspen and poplar; some had yellowed, and there was a dapple of gold and brown on the 
ground at their roots, but the foliage in the morning light was the green of summer, full of shad-ows and 
deep light. 
The Patterner led them along a path among the trees. As they went, Tenar thought again about Ged, 
remembering his voice as he told her about this place. She felt nearer him than she had been since she 
and Tehanu left him in the dooryard of their house in the early summer and walked down to Gont Port to 

take the king�s ship to Havnor. She knew Ged had lived here with the Patterner of long ago, and had 
walked here with Azver. She knew the Grove was to him the central and sacred place, the heart of peace. 
She felt that she might look up and see him at the end of one of the long, sun- dappled glades. And that 
notion eased her heart. 
For her dream of the night before had troubled her, and when Seserakh burst out with her dream of 
breaking taboo, Tenar had been deeply startled. She too had broken taboo in her dream, transgressed. 
She had climbed the last three stairs of the Empty Throne, the forbidden steps. The Place of the Tombs 
on Atuan was long ago and far away, and maybe the earthquake had left no throne or steps there at all in 
the temple where her name had been taken from her: but the Old Powers of the Earth were there, and 
they were here. They were not changed or moved. They were the earth-quake, and the earth. Their 
justice was not man�s justice. As she had walked by the round hill, Roke Knoll, she knew she walked 
where all the powers met. 
She had defied them, long ago, breaking free of the Tombs, stealing the treasure, fleeing here to the 
West. But they were here. Under her feet. In the roots of these trees, in the roots of the hill. 
So, here in the center where earth�s powers met, the human powers had also met together: a king, a 
princess, the masters of wizardry And the dragons. 
And a priestess-thief turned farmwife, and a village sor-cerer with a broken heart... 
She looked round at Alder. He was walking beside 
Tehanu. They were talking quietly. Tehanu talked more readily with him than with anyone, even Irian, 
and looked at ease when she was with him. It cheered Tenar to see them, and she walked on under the 
great trees, letting her aware-ness slip into a half trance of green light and moving leaves. She was sorry 
when, after only a short way, the Patterner halted. She felt she could walk forever in the Grove. 
They gathered in a grassy glade, open to the sky in the center where the branches did not reach to meet. 
A tributary of the Thwilburn ran across one side of it, willow and alder growing along its course. Not far 
from the stream was a low, lumpy house built of stone and sod, with a taller lean-to against its wall 
made of withies and mats of woven reed. �My winter palace, my summer palace,� Azver said. 
Both Onyx and Lebannen stared at these small struc-tures in surprise, and Irian said, �I never knew you 
had a house at all!� 
�I didn�t,� said the Patterner. �But bones get old.� 
With a little fetching and carrying from the ship, the house was soon furnished with bedding for the 
women, and the lean-to for the men. Boys ran back and forth to the eaves of the Grove with plentifiul 
provisions from the kitchens of the Great House. And late in the afternoon, the Masters of Roke came at 
the invitation of the Patterner to meet with the king�s party 
�Is this where they gather to choose the new Archmage?� Tenar asked Onyx, for Ged had told her of 
that secret glade. 
Onyx shook his head. �I think not,� he said. �The king would know, for he was there when they last met. 
But maybe only the Patterner could tell you. Because things change in this wood, you know. �It is not 
always where it is.� Nor are the ways through it ever quite the same, I think.� 
�It should be frightening,� she said, �but I can�t seem to be afraid.� 
Onyx smiled. �So it is, here,� he said. 
She watched the masters come into the glade, led by the big, bearlike Summoner and Gamble the young 
weather- master. Onyx told her who the others were: the Changer, the Chanter; the Herbal, the Hand: all 
grey-haired, the Changer frail with age, using his wizard�s staff as a walking stick. The Doorkeeper, 

smooth-faced and almond-eyed, seemed nei-ther young nor old. The Namer, who came last, looked forty 
or so. His face was calm and closed. He presented himself to the king, naming himself 
Kurremkarrnerruk. 
At that Irian burst out, indignant, �But you are not!� 
He looked at her and said evenly, �It is the Namers name. 
�Then my Kurremkarmerruk is dead?� 
He nodded. 
�Oh,� she cried, �that�s hard news to bear! He was my friend, when I had few friends here!� She turned 
away and would not look at the Namer, angry and tearless in her grief. She had greeted the Master 
Herbal with affection, and the Doorkeeper; but she did not speak to the others. 
Tenar saw that they watched Irian under their grey brows with uneasy looks. 
From her they looked at Tehanu; and looked away again; and glanced back, sidelong. And Tenar began 
to wonder what they saw when they looked at Tehanu and Irian. For these were men who saw with 
wizard�s eyes. 
So she bade herself forgive the Summoner for his un-couth and unconcealed horror when he first saw 
Tehanu. Maybe it had not been horron Maybe it had been awe. 
When they were all made known to one another and were seated in a circle, with cushions and stump 
seats for those who needed them, the grass for carpet, and sky and leaves for ceiling, the Patterner said 
in his voice that still had some Kargish accent in it, �If it please him, my fellow mas-ters, we will hear 
the king.� 
Lebannen stood up. As he spoke, Tenar watched him with irrepressible pride. He was so beautiful, so 
wise in his youth! She did not follow all his words at first, only the sense and passion of them. 
He told the masters, briefly and clearly, all the matter that had brought him to Roke: the dragons and the 
dreams. 
He ended, �It seemed to us that night by night all these things draw together, always more certainly, to 
some event, some end. It seemed to us that here, on this ground, with your knowledge and power aiding 
us, we might foresee and meet that event, not letting it overwhelm our understanding. The wisest of our 
mages have foretold: a great change is upon us. We must join together to learn what that change is, its 
causes, its course, and how we may hope to turn it from conffict and ruin to harmony and peace, in 
whose sign I rule.� 
Brand the Summoner stood to answer him. After some stately politenesses, with a special welcome to 
the High Princess, he said, �That the dreams of men, and more than their dreams, forewarn us of dire 
changes, all the masters and wizards of Roke agree. That there is a disturbance of the deepset boundaries 
between death and life-transgressions of those boundaries, and the threat of worse-we confirm. But that 
these disturbances can be understood or controlled by any but the masters of the art magic, we doubt. 
And very deeply do we doubt that dragons, whose lives and death are wholly different from that of man, 
can ever be trusted to submit their wild wrath and jealousy to serve human good.� 
�Summoner,� Lebannen said, before Irian could speak, �Orm Embar died for me on Selidor. Kalessin 
bore me to my throne.- Here in this circle are three peoples: the Kargish, the Hardic, and the People of 
the West.� 
�They were all one people, once,� said the Namer in his level, toneless voice. 
�But they are not now� said the Summoner, each word heavy and separate. �Do not misunderstand me 

because I speak hard truth, my Lord King! I honor the truce you have sworn with the dragons. When the 
danger we are in is past, Roke will aid Havnor in seeking lasting peace with them. But the dragons have 
nothing to do with this crisis that is upon us. Nor have the eastern peoples, who foreswore their immortal 
souls when they forgot the Language of the Making.� 
�Es eyemra,� said a soft, hissing voice: Tehanu, standing. 
The Summoner stared at hen 
�Our language,� she repeated in Hardic, staring back at him. 
Irian laughed. �Es eyemra,� she said. 
�You are not immortal,� Tenar said to the Summoner She had had no intention of speaking. She did not 
stand up. The words broke from her like fire from struck rock. �We are! 
We die to rejoin the undying world. It was you who fore- swore immortality.� 
Then they were all still. The Patterner had made a small movement of his hands, a gentle movement. 
His face was preoccupied, untroubled, as he studied a de-sign of a few twigs and leaves he had made on 
the grass where he sat, just in front of his crossed legs. He looked up, looked round at them all. �I think 
we will have to go there soon,� he said. 
After another silence, Lebannen asked, �Go where, my lord?� 
�Into the dark,� said the Patternen 
As ALDER SAT LISTENING to them speak, slowly the voices grew faint, fading, and the warm late 
sunlight of late sum-mer dimmed into darkness. Nothing was left but the trees: 
tall blind presences between the blind earth and the sky The oldest living children of the earth. 0 Segoy, 
he said in his heart: made and maker, let me come to you. 
The darkness went on and on, past the trees, past every-thing. 
Against that emptiness he saw the hill, the high hill that had been on their right as they walked up out of 
the town. He saw the dust of the road, the stones of the path, that led past that hill. 
He turned now aside from the path, leaving the others, and walked up the slope. 
The grasses were tall. The spent flower cases of spark-weed nodded among them. He came on a narrow 
path and followed it up the steep hillside. Now I am myself, he said in his heart. Segoy, the world is 
beautiful. Let me come through it to you. 
Ican do again what I was meant to do, he thought as he walked. I can mend what was broken. I can 
rejoin. 
He reached the top of the hill. Standing there in the sun and wind among the nodding grasses he saw on 
his right the fields, the roofs of the little town and the big house, the bright bay and the sea beyond it. If 
he turned he would see behind him in the west the trees of the endless forest, fading on and on into blue 
distances. Before him the hill slope was dim and grey, going down to the wall of stones and the darkness 
beyond the wall, and the crowding, calling shadows at the wall. I will come, he said to them. I will 
come! 
Warmth fell across his shoulders and his hands. Wind stirred in the leaves above his head. Voices spoke, 
speaking, not calling, not crying out his name. The Patterner�s eyes were watching him across the circle 
of grass. The Summoner too was watching him. He looked down, bewildered. He tried to listen. He 
gathered his mind and listened. 
The king was speaking, using all his skill and strength to hold these fierce, willful men and women to 

one purpose. �Let me try to tell you, Masters of Roke, what I learned from the High Princess as we 
sailed here. Princess, may I speak for you?� 
Unveiled, she gazed across the circle at him, and bowed grave permission. 
�This is her tale, then: long ago, the human and the dragon peoples were one kind, speaking one 
language. But they sought different things, and so they agreed to part-to go different ways. That 
agreement was called the Vedurnan.� 
Onyx�s head went up, and Seppel�s bright dark eyes widened. �Verw nadan,� he whispered. 
�The human beings went east, the dragons west. The humans gave up their knowledge of the Language 
of the Making, and in exchange received all skill and craft of hand, and ownership of all that hands can 
make. The dragons let go all such things. But they kept the Old Speech.� 
�And their wings,� said Irian. 
�And their wings,� Lebannen said. He had caught Azver�s eye. �Patterner, perhaps you can continue the 
story better than I?� 
�The villagers of Gont and Hur-at-Hur remember what the wise men of Roke and the priests of Karego 
forget,� Azver said. �Yes, as a child I was told this tale, I think, or something like it. But the dragons had 
been forgotten in it. It told how the Dark Folk of the Archipelago broke their oath. We had all promised 
to forgo sorcery and the language of sorcery, speaking only our common tongue. We would name no 
names, and make no spells. We would trust to Segoy, to the powers of the Earth our mother, mother of 
the Warrior Gods. But the Dark Folk broke the covenant. They caught the Language of the Making in 
their craft, writing it in runes. They kept it, taught it, used it. They made spells with it, with the skill of 
their hands, with false tongues speaking the true words. So the Kargish people can never trust them. So 
says the tale.� 
Irian spoke: �Men fear death as dragons do not. Men want to own life, possess it, as if it were a jewel in 
a box. Those ancient mages craved everlasting life. They learned to use true names to keep men from 
dying. But those who can-not die can never be reborn.� 
�The name and the dragon are one,� said Kurrem-karmerruk the Namer. �We men lost our names at the 
verw nadan, but we learned how to regain them. Name is self. Why should death change that?� 
He looked at the Summoner; but Brand sat heavy and grim, listening, not speaking. 
�Say more of this, Namer, if you will,� the king said. 
�I say what I have haff learned, half guessed, not from village tales but from the most ancient records in 
the Isolate Towes A thousand years before the first kings of Enlad, there were men in Ea and Solea, the 
first and greatest of the mages, the Rune Makers. It was they who learned to write the Language of the 
Making. They made the runes, which the dragons never learned. They taught us to give each soul its true 
name: which is its truth, its self. And with their power they granted to those who bear their true name 
life beyond the body�s death.� 
�Life immortal,� Seppel�s soft voice took the word. He spoke smiling a little. �In a great land of rivers 
and moun-tains and beautiful cities, where there is no suffering or pain, and where the self endures, 
unchanged, unchanging, for-ever... That is the dream of the ancient Lore of Pain.� 
�Where,� the Summoner said, �where is that land?� 
�On the other wind,� said Irian. �The west beyond the west.� She looked round at them all, scornful, 
irate. �Do you think we dragons fly only on the winds of this world? Do you think our freedom, for 
which we gave up all possessions, is no greater than that of the mindless seagulls? That our realm 
is a few rocks at the edge of your rich islands? You own the earth, you own the sea. But we are the fire 

of sunlight, we fly the wind! You wanted land to own. You wanted things to make and keep. And you 
have that. That was the division, the ver�w nadan. But you were not content with your share. You 
wanted not only your cares, but our freedom. You wanted the wind! And by the spells and wizardries of 
those oath-breakers, you stole half our realm from us, walled it away from life and light, so that you 
could live there foreverv Thieves, traitors!� 
�Sister,� Tehanu said. �These are not the men who stole from us. They are those who pay the price.� 
Asilence followed her harsh, whispering voice. 
�What was the price?� said the Names 
Tehanu looked at Jrian. Irian hesitated, and then said in a much subdued voice, �Greed puts out the sun. 
These are Ka-lessin�s words.� 
Azver the Patterner spoke. As he spoke, he looked into the aisles of the trees across the clearing, as if 
following the slight movements of the leaves. �The ancients saw that the dragons� realm was not of the 
body only. That they could fly.., outside of time, it may be ... And envying that free-dom, they followed 
the dragons� way into the west beyond the west. There they claimed part of that realm as their own. A 
timeless realm, where the self might be forever. But not in the body, as the dragons were. Only in spirit 
could men be there... So they made a wall which no living body could cross, neither man nor dragon. 
For they feared the anger of the dragons. And their arts of naming laid a great net of spells upon all the 
western lands, so that when the people of the islands die, they would come to the west beyond the west 
and live there in the spirit forever. 
�But as the wall was built and the spell laid, the wind ceased to blow within the wall. The sea withdrew. 
The springs ceased to run. The mountains of sunrise became the mountains of the night. Those that died 
came to a dark land, a dry land.� 
�I have walked in that land,� Lebannen said, low and un-willingly. �I do not fear death, but I fear it.� 
There was a silence among them. 
�Cob, and Thorion,� the Summoner said in his rough, reluctant voice, �they tried to break down that 
wall. To bring the dead back into life.� 
�Not into life, master,� Seppel said. �Still, like the Rune Makers, they sought the bodiless, immortal 
self.� 
�Yet their spells disturbed that place,� the Summoner said, brooding. �So the dragons began to 
remember the an-cient wrong. . . And so the souls of the dead come reaching now across the wall, 
yearning back to life.� 
Alder stood up. He said, �It is not life they yearn fort It is death. To be one with the earth again. To 
rejoin it.� 
They all looked at him, but he hardly knew it; his aware-ness was half with them, half in the dry land. 
The grass be-neath his feet was green and sunlit, was dead and dim. The leaves of the trees trembled 
above him and the low stone wall lay only a little distance from him, down the dark hill. Of them all he 
saw only Tehanu; he could not see her clearly, but he knew her, standing between him and the wall. He 
spoke to hen �They built it, but they cannot unbuild it,� he said. �Will you help me, Tehanu?� 
�I will, Hara,� she said. 
Ashadow rushed between them, a great dark bulky strength, hiding her, seizing him, holding him; he 
struggled, gasped for breath, could not draw breath, saw red fire in the darkness, and saw nothing more. 
THEY MET IN THE STARLIGHT at the edge of the glade, the king of the western lands and the 

Master of Roke, the two powers of Earthsea. 
�Will he live?� the Summoner asked, and Lebannen an-swered, �The healer says he is in no danger now. 
�I did wrong,� said the Summoner. �I am sorry for it.� 
�Why did you summon him back?� the king asked, not reproving but wanting an answen 
After a long time the Summoner said, grimly, �Because I had the power to do it.� 
They paced along in silence down an open path among the great trees. It was very dark to either hand, 
but the starlight shone grey where they walked. 
�I was wrong. But it is not right to want to die,� the Summoner said. The burr of the East Reach was in 
his voice. He spoke low, almost pleadingly. �For the very old, the very ill, it may be. But life is given us. 
Surely it�s wrong not to hold and treasure that great gift!� 
�Death also is given us,� said the king. 
ALDER LAY ON A PALLET on the grass. He should lie out under the stars, the Patterner had said, and 
the old Master Herbal had agreed to that. He lay asleep, and Tehanu sat still beside him. 
Tenar sat in the doorway of the low stone house and watched her. The great stars of late summer shone 
above the clearing: highest of them the star called Tehanu, the Swan�s Heart, the linchpin of the sky. 
Seserakh came quietly out of the house and sat down on the threshold beside her. She had taken off the 
circlet that held her veil, leaving her mass of tawny hair unbound. 
�Oh my friend,� she murmured, �what will happen to us? The dead are coming here. Do you feel them? 
Like the tide rising. Across that wall. I think nobody can stop them. All the dead people, from the graves 
of all the islands of the west, all the centuries.. 
Tenar felt the beating, the calling, in her head and in her blood. She knew now, they all knew, what 
Alder had known. But she held to what she trusted, even if trust had become mere hope. She said, �They 
are only the dead, Seserakh. We built a false wall. It must be unbuilt. But there is a true one. 
Tehanu got up and came softly over to them. She sat on the doorstep below them. 
�He�s all right, he�s sleeping,� she whispered. 
�Were you there with him?� Tenar asked. Tehanu nodded. �We were at the wall.� 
�What did the Summoner do?� 
�Summoned him-brought him back by force.� 
�Into life.� 
�Into life.� 
�I don�t know which I should fear more,� Tenar said, �death or life. I wish I could be done with fear.� 
Seserakh�s face, the wave of her warm hair, bent down to Tenar�s shoulder for a moment in a light 
caress. �You are 
brave, brave,� she murmured. �But oh! I fear the sea! and I fear death!� 

Tehanu sat quietly. In the faint soft light that hung among the trees, Tenar could see how her daughter�s 
slender hand lay crossed over her burnt and twisted hand. 
�I think,� Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, �that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that 
made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn�t do. All that I might have been and couldn�t 
be. All the choices I didn�t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the 
world. To the lives that haven�t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the 
life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.� 
She looked up at the stars and sighed. �Not for a long time yet,� she whispered. Then she looked round 
at Tenar. 
Seserakh stroked Tenar�s hair gently, rose, and went silently into the house. 
�Before long, I think, mother... 
�I know.� 
�I don�t want to leave you. 
�You have to leave me. 
�I know.� 
They sat on in the glimmering darkness of the Grove, silent. 
�Look,� Tehanu murmured. A shooting star sky, a quick, slow-fading trail of light. 
crossed the 
FIVE WIZARDS SAT IN starlight. �Look,� one said, his hand following the trail of the shooting star. 
�The soul of a dragon dying,� said Azver the Patterner. �So they say in Karego-At.� 
�Do dragons die?� asked Onyx, musing. �Not as we do, I think.� 
�They don�t live as we do. They move between the worlds. So says Orm Irian. From the world�s wind to 
the other wind.� 
�As we sought to do,� said Seppel. �And failed.� Gamble looked at him curiously. �Have you on Pain always 
known this tale, this lore we have learned today-of the parting of dragon and mankind, and the 
making of the dry land?� 
�Not as we heard it today. I was taught that the verw nadan was the first great triumph of the art magic. 
And that the goal of wizardry was to triumph over time and live for-ever... Hence the evils the Pelnish 
Lore has done.� 
�At least you kept the Mother knowledge we despised,� Onyx said. �As your people did, Azver.� 
�Well, you had the sense to build your Great House here,� the Patterner said, smiling. 
�But we built it wrong,� Onyx said. �All we build, we build wrong.� 
�So we must knock it down,� said Seppel. 
�No,� said Gamble. �We�re not dragons. We do live in houses. We have to have some walls, at least.� 
�So long as the wind can blow through the windows,� said Azven 
�And who will come in the doors?� asked the Doorkeeper in his mild voice. 
There was a pause. A cricket trilled industriously some-where across the glade, fell silent, trilled again. 
�Dragons?� said Azver. 
The Doorkeeper shook his head. �I think maybe the di-vision that was begun, and then betrayed, will be 
completed at last,� he said. �The dragons will go free, and leave us here to the choice we made.� 
�The knowledge of good and evil,� said Onyx. 
�The joy of making, shaping,� said Seppel. �Our mastery.� 
�And our greed, our weakness, our fear,� said Azves 

The cricket was answered by another, closer to the stream. The two triMs pulsed, crossed, in and out of 
rhythm. 
�What I fear,� said Gamble, �so much that I fear to say it-is this: that when the dragons go, our mastery 
will go with them. Our art. Our magic.� 
The silence of the others showed that they feared what he did. But the Doorkeeper spoke at last, gently, 
but with some certainty �No, I think not. They are the Making, yes. But we learned the Making. We 
made it ours. It can�t be taken from us. To lose it we must forget it, throw it away.� 
�As my people did,� said Azven 
�Yet your people remembered what the earth is, what life everlasting is,� said Seppel. �While we forgot.� 
There was another long silence among them. 
�I could reach my hand out to the wall,� Gamble said in a very low voice, and Seppel said, �They are 
near, they are very near. 
�How are we to know what we should do?� Onyx said. 
Azver spoke into the silence that followed the question. �Once when my lord the Archmage was here 
with me in the Grove, he said to me he had spent his life learning how to choose to do what he had no 
choice but to do.� 
�I wish he were here now,� said Onyx. 
�He�s done with doing,� the Doorkeeper murmured, smiling. 
�But we�re not. We sit here talking on the edge of the precipice-we all know it.� Onyx looked round at 
their star- lit faces. �What do the dead want of us?� 
�What do the dragons want of us?� said Gamble. �These women who are dragons, dragons who are 
women-why are they here? Can we trust them?� 
�Have we a choice?� said the Doorkeeper. 
�I think not,� said the Patterner. An edge of hardness, a sword�s edge, had come into his voice. �We can 
only follow.� 
�Follow the dragons?� Gamble asked. 
Azver shook his head. �Alder.� 
�But he�s no guide, Patterner!� said Gamble. �A village mender?� 
Onyx said, �Alder has wisdom, but in his hands, not in his head. He follows his heart. Certainly he 
doesn�t seek to lead us.� 
�Yet he was chosen from among us all.� 
�Who chose him?� Seppel asked softly. 
The Patterner answered him: �The dead.� 
They sat silent. The crickets� trill had ceased. Two tall figures came towards them through the grass lit 
grey by starlight. �May Brand and I sit with you a while?� Lebannen said. �There is no sleep tonight.� 
ON THE DOORSTEP OF the house on the Overfell, Ged sat watching the stars above the sea. He had 
gone in to sleep an hour or more ago, but as he closed his eyes he saw the hillside 
and heard the voices rising like a wave. He got up at once and went outside, where he could see the 
stars move. 
He was tired. His eyes would close, and then he would be there by the wall of stones, his heart cold with 
dread that he would be there forever, not knowing the way back. At last, impatient and sick of fear, he 
got up again, fetched a lantern from the house and lit it, and set off on the path to Moss�s house. Moss 

might or might not be frightened; she lived pretty near the wall, these days. But Heather would be in a 
panic, and Moss would not be able to soothe her. And since whatever had to be done, it wasn�t he who 
could do it this time, he could at least go comfort the poor half-wit. He could tell her it was only dreams. 
It was hard going in the dark, the lantern throwing great shadows of small things across the path. He 
walked slower than he would have liked to walk, and stumbled sometimes. 
He saw a light in the widower�s house, late as it was. A child wailed, over in the village. Mother, 
mother, why are the people crying? Who are the people crying, mother? There was no sleep there, either. 
There was not much sleep anywhere in Earthsea, tonight, Ged thought. He grinned a little as he thought 
it; for he had always liked that pause, that fearful pause, the moment before things changed. 
ALDER WOKE. HE LAY ON earth and felt its depth beneath him. Above him the bright stars burned, 
the stars of sum-mer, moving between leaf and leaf with the wind�s blowing, moving from east to west 
with the world�s turning. He watched them a while before he let them go. 
Tehanu was waiting for him on the hill. 
�What must we do, Ham?� she asked him. 
�We have to mend the world,� he said. He smiled, because his heart had grown light at last. �We have to 
break the wall.� 
�Can they help us?� she asked, for the dead were gath-ered waiting down in the darkness as countless as 
grass or sand or stars, silent now; a great, dim beach of souls. 
�No,� he said, �but maybe others can.� He walked down the hill to the wall. It was liffle more than waisthigh 
here. He put his hands on one of the stones of the coping row and tried to move it. It was Exed fast, 
or was heavier than a stone should be; he could not lift it, could not make it move at all. 
Tehanu came beside him. �Help me,� he said. She put her hands on the stone, the human hand and the 
burnt claw, gripping it as well as she could, and gave a lifting tug as he did. The stone moved a little, 
then a little more. �Push it!� she said, and together they pushed it slowly out of place, grating hard on the 
rock beneath it, till it fell on the far side of the wall with a dull heavy thump. 
The next stone was smaller; together they could lift it up out of its place. They let it drop into the dust on 
the near side. 
Atremor ran through the ground under their feet then. Small chinking stones in the wall raffled. And 
with a long sigh, the multitudes of the dead came closer to the wall. 
THE PATTERNER STOOD UP suddenly and stood listening. Leaves stormed all about the glade, the 
trees of the Grove bowed and trembled as if under a great wind, but there was no wind. 
�Now it changes,� he said, and he walked away ftom them, into the darkness under the trees. 
The Summoner, the Doorkeeper, and Seppel rose and followed him, quick and silent. Gamble and Onyx 
followed more slowly after them. 
Lebannen stood up; he took a few steps after the others, hesitated, and hurried across the glade to the 
low house of stone and sod. �Irian,� he said, stooping to the dark doorway. �Irian, will you take me with 
you?� 
She came out of the house; she was smiling, and there was a kind of fiery brightness all about hen 
�Come then, come quick,� she said, and took his hand. Her hand burned like a coal of fire as she lifted 
him into the other wind. 
After a little time Seserakh came out of the house into the starlight, and after her came Tenar. They 

stood and looked about them. Nothing moved; the trees were still again. 
�They are all gone,� Seserakh whispered. �On the Drag-ons� Way.� 
She took a step forward, gazing into the dark 
�What are we to do, Tenar?� 
�We are to keep the house,� Tenar said. 
�Oh!� Seserakh whispered, dropping to her knees. She had seen Lebannen lying near the doorway, 
stretched face-down in the grass. �He isn�t dead-I think- Oh, my dear Lord King, don�t go, don�t die!� 
�He�s with them. Stay with him. Keep him warm. Keep the house, Seserakh,� Tenar said. She went to 
where Alder lay, his unseeing eyes turned to the stars. She sat down by him, her hand on his. She waited. 
ALDER COULD SCARCELY move the great stone his hands were on, but the Summoner was beside 
him, stooping with his shoulder against it, and said, �Now!� Together they pushed it till it overbalanced 
and dropped down with that same heam final thump on the far side of the wall. 
Others were there now with him and Tehanu, wrenching at the stones, casting them down beside the 
wall. Alder saw his own hands cast shadows for an instant from a red gleam. Orm Irian, as he had seen 
her first, a great dragon shape, had let out her fiery breath as she struggled to move a boulder from the 
lowest rank of stones, deepset in the earth. Her talons struck sparks and her thorned back arched, and the 
rock rolled ponderously free, breaching the wall entirely in that place. 
There was a vast, soft cry among the shadows on the other side, like the sound of the sea on a hollow 
shore. Their darkness surged up against the wall. But Alder looked up and saw that it was no longer 
dark. Light moved in that sky where the stars had never moved, quick sparks of fire far in the dark west. 
�Kalessin!� 
That was Tehanu�s voice. He looked at hen She was gaz-ing upward, westward. She had no eye for earth. 
She reached up her arms. Fire ran along her hands, her arms, into her hair, into her face and body, 
flamed up into great wings above her head, and lifted her into the air, a crea-ture all fire, blazing, 
beautiftil. 
She cried out aloud, a clear, wordless cry. She flew high, headlong, fast, up into the sky where the light 
was growing and a white wind had erased the unmeaning stars. 
From among the hosts of the dead a few here and there, 
like her, rose up flickering into dragons, and mounted on the wind. 
Most came forward afoot. They were not pressing, not crying out now, but walking with unhurried 
certainty to-wards the fallen places in the wall: great multitudes of men and women, who as they came 
to the broken wall did not hesitate but stepped across it and were gone: a wisp of dust, a breath that 
shone an instant in the ever-brightening light. 
Alder watched them. He still held in his hands, forgot-ten, a chinking stone he had wrenched from the 
wall to loosen a larger rock He watched the dead go free. At last he saw her among them. He tossed the 
stone aside then and stepped forward. �Lily,� he said. She saw him and smiled and held out her hand to 
him. He took her hand, and they crossed together into the sunlight. 
LEBANNEN STOOD BY the ruined wall and watched the dawn brighten in the east. There was an east 
now, where there had been no direction, no way to go. There was east and west, and light and motion. 
The very ground moved, shook, shiv-ering like a great animal, so that the wall of stones beyond where 
they had broken it shuddered and slid into rubble. Fire broke from the far, black peaks of the mountains 

called Pain, the fire that burns in the heart of the world, the fire that feeds dragons. 
He looked into the sky over those mountains and saw, as he and Ged had seen them once above the 
western sea, the dragons flying on the wind of morning. 
Three came wheeling towards him where he stood among the others near the crest of the hill, above the 
mined wall. Two he knew, Orm Irian and Kalessin. The third had bright mail, gold, with wings of gold. 
That one flew highest and did not stoop down to them. Orm Irian played about her in the air and they 
flew together, one chasing the other higher and higher, till all at once the highest rays of the ris-ing sun 
stmck Tehanu and she burned like her name, a great bright star. 
Kalessin circled again, flew low, and alighted hugely amid the mins of the wall. 
Agni Lebannen,� said the dragon to the king. 
�Eldest,� the king said to the dragon. 
Aissadan vertv nadannan,� said the vast, hissing voice, like a sea of cymbals. 
Beside Lebannen, Brand the Summoner of Roke stood planted solidly. He repeated the dragon�s words 
in the Speech of the Making, and then said them in Hardic: 
�What was divided is divided.� 
The Patterner stood near them, his hair bright in the brightening light. He said, �What was built is 
broken. What was broken is made whole.� 
Then he looked up yearning into the sky, at the gold dragon and the red-bronze one; but they had flown 
almost out of sight, wheeling now in vast gyres over the long, falling land, where empty shadow cities 
faded to nothing in the light of day. 
�Eldest,� he said, and the long head swung slowly back to him. 
�Will she follow the way back through the forest, some-times?� Azver asked in the speech of dragons. 
Kalessin�s long, fathomless, yellow eye regarded him. The enormous mouth seemed, like the mouths of 
lizards, closed upon a smile. It did not speak. 
Then ponderously dragging its length along the wall so that stones still standing slid and fell grating 
beneath its iron belly, Kalessin writhed away from them, and with a rush and rattle of upraised wings 
pushed off from the hillside and flew low over the land towards the mountains, whose peaks now were 
bright with smoke and white steam, fire and sunlight. 
�Come, friends,� said Seppel in his soft voice. �It�s not yet our time to go free.� 
SUNLIGHT WAS IN THE sky above the crowns of the highest trees, but the glade still held the chill 
grey of dawn. Tenar sat with her hand on Alder�s hand, her face bowed down. She looked at the cold 
dew beading a grass blade, how it hung in tiny, delicate drops along the blade, each drop reflecting all 
the world. 
Someone spoke her name. She did not look up. 
�He�s gone,� she said. 
The Patterner knelt by hen He touched Alder�s face with a gentle hand. 
He knelt there silent a while. Then he said to Tenar in her language, �My lady, I saw Tehanu. She flies 
golden on the other wind.� 
Tenar glanced up at him. His face was White and worn, but there was a shadow of glory in his eyes. 
She struggled and then said, speaking roughly and a> most inaudibly, �Whole?� 
He nodded. 
She stroked Alder�s hand, the mender�s hand, fine, skill-fiil. Tears came into her eyes. 

�Let me be with him a while,� she said, and she began to cry She put her hands to her face and cried 
hard, bitterly, silently. 
AZVER WENT TO THE little group by the door of the house. Onyx and Gamble were near the 
Summoner who stood, heavy and anxious, near the princess. She crouched beside Lebannen, her arms 
across him, protecting him, daring any wizard to touch him. Her eyes flashed. She held Lebannen�s short 
steel dagger naked in her hand. 
�I came back with him,� Brand said to Azven �I tried to stay with him. I wasn�t sure of the way. She 
won�t let me near him.� 
�Gana4� Azver said, her tide in Kargish, princess. 
Her eyes flashed up to him. �Oh may Atwah-Wuluah be thanked and the Mother praised for ever!� she 
cried. �Lord Azver! Make these accursed-sorcerers go away. Kill them! They have killed my king.� She 
held out the dagger to him by its slender steel blade. 
�No, princess. He went with the dragon Irian. But this sorcerer brought him back to us. Let me see him,� 
and he knelt and turned Lebannen�s face a little to see it better, and laid his hands on his chest. �He�s 
cold,� he said. �It was a hard way back Take him in your arms, princess. Keep him warm. 
�I have tried to,� she said, biting her lip. She flung down the dagger and bent to the unconscious man. �0 
poor king!� she said softly in Hardic, �dear king, poor king!� 
Azver got up and said to the Summoner, �I think he will be all right, Brand. She is much more use than 
we are, now. 
The Summoner put out his big hand and took hold of Azver�s arm. �Steady now,� he said. 
�The Doorkeeper,� A..zver said, going whiter than before and looking around the glade. 
�He came back with the Pelriishman,� Brand said. �Sit down, Azver.� 
Azver obeyed him, sitting down on the log seat the old Changer had sat on in their circle the afternoon 
before. A thousand years ago it seemed. The old men had gone back to the School in the evening.. . And 
then the long night had begun, the night that brought the wall of stones so close that to sleep was to be 
there, and to be there was terror, so no one had slept. No one, maybe, in all Roke, in all the isles... Only 
Alder, who went to guide them.. . Azver found he was doz-ing and shivering. 
Gamble tried to make him go inside the winter house, but Azver insisted that he should be near the 
princess to in-terpret for hen And near Tenar, he thought without saying it, to protect hen To let her 
grieve. But Aider was done with grieving. He had passed his grief to hen To them all. His joy... 
The Herbal came from the School and fussed about Azver, put a winter cloak over his shoulders. He sat 
on in a weary, feverish half doze, not heeding the others, dimly irri-tated by the presence of so many 
people in his sweet silent glade, watching the sunlight creep down among the leaves. His vigil was 
rewarded when the princess came to him, knelt before him looking with solicitous respect into his face, 
and said, �Lord Azver, the king would speak with you.� 
She helped him stand up, as if he were an old man. He did not mind. �Thank you, gainha,� he said. 
�I am not queen,� she said with a laugh. 
�You will be,� said the Patterner. 
IT WAS THE STRONG TIDE of the frill moon, and Dolphin had to wait for the slack to run between 
the Armed Cliffs. Tenar did not disembark in Gont Port till midmorning, and then there was the long 
walk uphill. It was near sunset when she came through Re Albi and took the cliff path to the house. 

Ged was watering the cabbages, well grown by now. 
He straightened up and looked at her coming to him, that hawk look, frowning. �Alt� he said. 
�Oh my dear,� she said. She hurried, the last few steps, as he came to hen 
SHE WAS TIRED. She was very glad to sit with him with a glass of Spark�s good red wine and watch 
the evening of early autumn flare into gold over all the western sea. 
�How can I tell you everything?� she said. 
�Tell it backward,� he said. 
�All right. I will. They Wanted me to stay, but I said I wanted to go home. But there was a council 
meeting, the King�s Council, you know, for the betrothal. There�ll be a grand wedding and all, of course, 
but I don�t think I have to go. Because that was truly when they married. With Elfar-ran�s Ring. Our 
ring.� 
He looked at her and smiled, the broad, sweet smile that 
she thought, perhaps wrongly perhaps rightly, nobody but her had ever seen on his face. 
�Yes?� he said. 
�Lebannen came and stood here, see, on my left, and then Seserak� came and stood here on my right. In 
front of Morred�s throne. And I held up the Ring. The way I did when we brought it to Havnor, 
remember? in Lookfar, in the sunlight? Lebannen took it in his hands and kissed it and gave it back to 
me. And I put it on her arm, it just went over her hand-she�s not a little woman, Seserakh- Oh, you 
should see her, Ged! What a beauty she is, what a lion! He�s met his match. -And everybody shouted. 
And there were festivals and so on. And so I could get away. 
�Go on.� 
�Backward?� 
�Backward.� 
�Well. Before that was Roke.� 
�Roke�s never simple.� 
�No.� 
They drank their red wine in silence. 
�Tell me of the Patterner.� 
She smiled. �Seserakh calls him the Warrion She says only a warrior would fall in love with a dragon.� 
�Who followed him to the dry land-that night?� 
�He followed Alder.� 
�Alt,� Ged said, with surprise and a certain satisfaction. 
�So did others of the masters. And Lebannen, and Irian.. 
�And Tehanu.� 
A silence. 
�She went out of the house. When I came out she was gone.� A long silence. �Azver saw her. In the 
sunrise. On the other wind.� 
Asilence. 
�They�re all gone. There are no dragons left in Havnor or the western islands. Onyx said: as that shadow 
place and all the shadows in it rejoined the world of light, so they re-gained their true realm.� 
�We broke the world to make it whole,� Ged said. 
After a long time Tenar said in a soft, thin voice, �The Patterner believes Irian will come to the Grove if 

he calls to her.� 
Ged said nothing, till, after a while: �Look there, Tenar.� 
She looked where he was looking, into the dim gulf of air above the western sea. 
�If she comes, she�ll come from there,� he said. �And if she doesn�t come, she is there.� 
She nodded. �I know.� Her eyes were full of tears. �Lebannen sang me a song, on the ship, when we 
were going back to Havnor.� She could not sing; she whispered the words. �0 my joy, be free...� 
He looked away, up at the forests, at the mountain, the darkening heights. 
�Tell me,� she said, �tell me what you did while I was gone. 
�Kept the house.� 
�Did you walk in the forest?� 
�Not yet,� he said. 

The Royals of Hegn 

by Ursula K. Le Guin 

 

Hegn is a small country, an island monarchy blessed with a marvelous climate and 
a vegetation so rich that lunch or dinner there consists of reaching up to a 
tree to pluck a succulent, sunwarmed, ripe, rare steakfruit, or sitting down 
under a llumbush and letting the buttery morsels drop onto one&#146;s lap or 
straight into one mouth. And then for dessert there are the sorbice blossoms, 
tart, sweet, and crunchy. 

Four or five centuries ago the Hegnish were evidently an enterprising, stirring 
lot, who built good roads, fine cities, noble country houses and palaces, all 
surrounded by literally delicious gardens. Then they entered a settling-down 
phase, and at present they simply live in their beautiful houses. They have 
hobbies, pursued with tranquil obsession. Some take up the cultivation and 
breeding of ever finer varieties of grapes. (The Hegnian grape is selffermenting; 
a small cluster of them has the taste, scent, and effect of a split 
of Veuve Clicquot. Left longer on the vine, the grapes reach 80 or 90 proof, and 
the taste comes to resemble a good single malt whiskey.) Some raise pet gorkis, 
an amiable, short-legged domestic animal; others embroider pretty hangings for 
the churches; many take their pleasure in sports. They all enjoy social 
gatherings. 

People dress nicely for these parties. They eat some grapes, dance a little, and 
talk. Conversation is desultory and, some would say, vapid. It concerns the kind 
and quality of the grapes, discussed with much technicality; the weather, which 
is usually settled fair, but can always be threatening, or have threatened, to 
rain; and sports, particularly the characteristically Hegnish game of sutpot, 
which requires a playing field of several acres and involves two teams, many 
rules, a large ball, several small holes in the ground, a movable fence, a 
short, flat bat, two vaulting poles, four umpires, and several days. No non- 
Hegnish person has ever been able to understand it. Hegnishmen discuss the last 
match played with the same grave deliberation and relentless attention to detail 
with which they played it. Other subjects of conversation are the behavior of 
pet gorkis and the decoration of the local church. Religion and politics are 
never discussed. It may be that they do not exist, having been reduced to a 
succession of purely formal events and observances, while their place is filled 
by the central element, the focus and foundation of Hegnish society, which is 
best described as the Degree of Consanguinity. 

It is a small island, and nearly everybody is related. As it is a monarchy, or 
rather a congeries of monarchies, this means that almost everybody is related to 
a monarch or is a member of the Royal Family. 

In earlier times this universality of aristocracy caused trouble and dissension. 
Rival claimants to the crown tried to eliminate each other; there was a long 
period of violence referred to as the Purification of the Peerage, a war called 
the Agnate War, and the brief, bloody Cross-Cousins Revolt. But all these family 
quarrels were settled when the genealogies of every lineage and individual were 
established and recorded in the great work of 

 the reign of Eduber XII of Sparg, the 
<I>Book of the Blood.</I></FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="2">Now 
four hundred and eighty-eight years old, this book is, I may 

 say without exaggeration, the 
centerpiece of every Hegnish household. 

 Indeed it is the only book anybody 
ever reads. Most people know 

 the sections dealing with their own 
family by heart. Publication 

 of the annual <I>Addition and 
Supplements to the Book of the Blood</I> is<I> </I>awaited as the great event of 
the year. It furnishes the staple 

 of conversation for months, as people 
discuss the sad extinction 


 of the Levigian House with the death 
of old Prince Levigvig, the 

 exciting possibility of an heir to the 
Swads arising from the 

 eminently suitable marriage of Endol 
IV and the Duchess of Mabuber, 

 the unexpected succession of Viscount 
Lagn to the crown of East 

 Fob due to the untimely deaths of his 
great-uncle, his uncle, 

 and his cousin all in the same year, 
or the re-legitimization 

 (by decree of the Board of Editors- 
Royal) of the great-grandson 

 of the Bastard of Egmorg.</FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="2">There 
are eight hundred and seventeen kings in Hegn. Each has 

 title to certain lands, or palaces, or 
at least parts of palaces; 

 but actual rule or dominion over a 
region isn&#146;t what makes a king 

 a king. What matters is having the 
crown and wearing it on certain 

 occasions, such as the coronation of 
another king, and having 

 one&#146;s lineage recorded 
unquestionably in the <I>Book of the Blood, </I>and edging the sod at the first 
game of the local sutpot season, 

 and being present at the annual 
Blessing of the Fish, and knowing 

 that one&#146;s wife is the queen and 
one&#146;s eldest son is the crown 

 prince and one&#146;s brother is the 
prince royal and one&#146;s sister 

 is the princess royal and all 
one&#146;s relations and all their children 

 are of the blood royal.</FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="2">To 
maintain an aristocracy it is necessary that persons of exalted 

 rank form intimate association only 
with others of their kind. 

 Fortunately there are plenty of those. 
Just as the bloodline of 

 a Thoroughbred horse on my planet can 
be tracked straight back 

 to the Godolphin Arabian, every royal 
family of Hegn can trace 

 its ancestry back to Rugland of Hegn- 
Glander, who ruled eight 

 centuries ago. The horses don&#146;t 
care, but their owners do, and 

 so do the kings and the royal families. 
In this sense, Hegn may 

 be seen as a vast stud 
farm.</FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="2">There 
is an unspoken consensus that certain royal houses are slightly, 

 as it were, more royal than others, 
because they descend directly 

 from Rugland&#146;s eldest son rather 
than one of his eight younger 


 sons; but all the other royal houses 
have married into the central 

 line often enough to establish an 
unshakable connection. Each 

 house also has some unique, 
incomparable claim to distinction, 

 such as descent from Alfign the Ax, 
the semi-legendary conqueror 

 of North Hegn, or a collateral saint, 
or a family tree never sullied 

 by marriage with a mere duke or 
duchess but exhibiting (on the 

 ever-open page of the <I>Book of the 
Blood </I>in the palace library) a continuous and unadulterated flowering 

 of true blue princes and processes. 
</FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="2">And so, 
when the novelty of the annual <I>Addition and Supplements </I>at last wears 
thin, the royal guests at the royal parties can 

 always fall back on discussing degrees 
of consanguinity, settling 

 such questions as whether the son born 
of Agnin IV&#146;s second marriage, 

 to Tivand of Shut, was or was not the 
same prince who was slain 

 at the age of thirteen defending his 
father&#146;s palace against the 

 Anti-Agnates and therefore could, or 
could not, have been the 

 father of the Duke of Vigrign, later 
King of Shut.</FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="2">Such 
questions are not of interest to everyone, and the placid 

 fanaticism with which the Hegnish 
pursue them bores or offends 

 many visitors to the island. The fact 
that the Hegnish have absolutely 

 no interest in any people except 
themselves can also cause offense, 

 or even rage. Foreigners exist. That 
is all the Hegnish know about 

 them, and all they care to know. They 
are too polite to say that 

 it is a pity that foreigners exist, 
but if they had to think about 

 it, they would think so. </FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="2">They do 
not, however, have to think about foreigners. That is 

 taken care of for them. The 
Interplanary Hotel on Hegn is in Hemgogn, 

 a beautiful little kingdom on the west 
coast. The Interplanary 

 Agency runs the hotel and hires local 
guides. The guides, mostly 

 dukes and earls, take visitors to see 
the Alternation of the Watch 

 on the Walls, performed by princes of 
the blood, wearing magnificent 

 traditional regalia, at noon and six 
daily. The Agency also offers 


 day tours to a couple of other 
kingdoms. The bus runs softly along 

 the ancient, indestructible roads 
among sunlit orchards and wildfood 

 forests. The tourists get out of the 
bus and look at the ruins, 

 or walk through the parts of the 
palace open to visitors. The 

 inhabitants of the palace are aloof 
but unfailingly civil and 

 courteous, as befits royalty. Perhaps 
the Queen comes down and 

 smiles at the tourists without 
actually looking at them and instructs 

 the pretty little Crown Princess to 
invite them to pick and eat 

 whatever they like in the lunchorchard, 
and then she and the 

 Princess go back into the private part 
of the palace, and the 

 tourists have lunch and get back into 
the bus. And that is that.</FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="2">Being 
an introvert, I rather like Hegn. One does not have to mingle, 

 since one can&#146;t. And the food is 
good, and the sunlight sweet. 

 I went there more than once, and 
stayed longer than most people 

 do, and so it happened that I learned 
about the Hegnish Commoners.</FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="2">I was 
walking down the main street of Legners Royal, the capital 

 of Hemgogn, when I saw a crowd in the 
square in front of the old 

 Church of the Thrice Royal Martyr. I 
thought it must be one of 

 the many annual festivals or rituals 
and joined the crowd to watch. 

 These events are always slow, decorous, 
and profoundly dull. But 

 they&#146;re the only events there are: 
and they have their own tedious 

 charm. Soon, however, I saw this was a 
funeral. And it was altogether 

 different from any Hegnish ceremony I 
had ever witnessed, above 

 all in the behavior of the 
people.</FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="2">They 
were all royals, of course, like any crowd in Hegn, all of 

 them princes, dukes, earls, princesses, 
duchesses, countesses, 

 etc. But they were not behaving with 
the regal reserve, the sovereign 

 aplomb, the majestic apathy I had 
always seen in them before. 

 They were standing about in the square, 
for once not engaged in 

 any kind of prescribed ritual duty or 
traditional occupation or 


 hobby, but just crowding together. as 
if for comfort. They were 

 disturbed, distressed, disorganized, 
and verged upon being noisy. 

 They showed emotion. They were 
grieving, openly grieving.</FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="2">The 
person nearest me in the crowd was the Dowager Duchess of 

 Mogn and Farstis, the Queen&#146;s 
aunt by marriage. I knew who she 

 was because I had seen her, every 
morning at half past eight, 

 issue forth from the Royal Palace to 
walk the King&#146;s pet gorki 

 in the Palace gardens, which border on 
the hotel, and one of the 

 Agency guides had told me who she was. 
I had watched from the 

 window of the breakfast room of the 
hotel while the gorki, a fine, 

 heavily testicled specimen, relieved 
himself under the cheeseblossom 

 bushes, and the Dowager Duchess gazed 
away into a tranquil vacancy 

 reserved for the eyes of true 
aristocrats.</FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="2">But now 
those pale eyes were filled with tears, and the soft, 

 weathered face of the Duchess worked 
with the effort to control 

 her feelings.</FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" 
SIZE="2">&quot;Your ladyship,&quot; I said, hoping that the translatomat would 
provide 

 the proper appellation for a duchess 
in case I had it wrong, &quot;forgive 

 me, I am from another country, whose 
funeral is this?&quot;</FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="2">She 
looked at me unseeing, dimly surprised but too absorbed in 

 sorrow to wonder at my ignorance or my 
effrontery. &quot;Sissie&#146;s,&quot; 

 she said, and speaking the name made 
her break into open sobs 

 for a moment. She turned away, hiding 
her face in her large lace 

 handkerchief, and I dared ask no 
more.</FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="2">The 
crowd was growing rapidly, constantly. By the time the coffin 

 was borne forth from the church, there 
must have been over a thousand 

 people, most of the population of 
Legners, all of them members 

 of the Royal Family, crowded into the 
square. The King and his 

 two sons and his brother followed the 
coffin at a respectful distance.</FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="2">The 
coffin was carried and closely surrounded by people I had 


 never seen before, a very odd 
lot&#150;pale, fat men in cheap suits, 

 pimply boys, middle-aged women with 
brassy hair and stiletto heels, 

 and a highly visible young woman with 
thick thighs in a miniskirt, 

 a halter top, and a black cotton lace 
mantilla. She staggered 

 along after the coffin weeping aloud, 
half-hysterical, supported 

 on one side by a scared-looking man 
with a pencil mustache and 

 two-tone shoes, on the other by a 
small, dry, tired, dogged woman 

 in her seventies dressed entirely in 
rusty black.</FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="2">At the 
far edge of the crowd I saw a native guide with whom I 

 had struck up a lightweight friendship, 
a young viscount, son 

 of the Duke of Ist, and I worked my 
way toward him. It took quite 

 a while, as everyone was streaming 
along with the slow procession 

 of the coffin-bearers and their 
entourage toward the King&#146;s limousines 

 and horse-drawn coaches that waited 
near the Palace gates. When 

 I finally got to the guide I said, 
&quot;Who is it? Who are they?&quot;</FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" 
SIZE="2">&quot;Sissie,&quot; he said almost in a wail, caught up in the general 
grief&#150;&quot;Sissie 

 died last night!&quot; Then, coming 
back to his duties as guide and 

 interpreter and trying to regain his 
pleasant aristocratic manner, 

 he looked at me, blinked back his 
tears, and said, &quot;They&#146;re our 

 commoners.&quot;</FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" 
SIZE="2">&quot;And Sissie&#150;?&quot;</FONT></P> 

 <P><FONT FACE="Arial" 
SIZE="2">&quot;She&#146;s, she was, their daughter. The only daughter.&quot; Do 
what he 

 could, the tears would well into his 
eyes. &quot;She was such a dear 

 girl. Such a help to her mother, 
always. Such a sweet smile. And 

 there&#146;s nobody like her, nobody. 
She was the only one. Oh, she 

 was so full of love. Our poor little 
Sissie!&quot; And he broke right 

 down and cried aloud.</FONT></TD> 

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THE VISIONARY 

by URSULA K. LE GUIN 

 

from Omni October 1984 

 

 

 My mother and aunt said that when I was learning to talk, I talked to people they could not see or hear, sometimes 
speaking in our language and sometimes saying words or names they did not know. I can't remember doing that, but I 
remember that I could not understand why people said that a room was empty or that there was nobody in the gardens, 
because there were always people of different kinds, everywhere. Mosty they stayed quietly or were going about their 
doings, or passing through. I had already learned that nobody talked to them and that they did not often pay heed or 
answer when I tried to talk to them, but it had not occurred to me that other people did not see them. 

 I had a big argument with my cousin once when she said there was nobody in the wash house, and I had seen a 
whole group of people there, passing things from hand to hand and laughing silently, as if they were playing some 
gambling game. My cousin, who was older than I, said I was lying, and I began to scream and tried to knock her down. 
I can feel that same anger now. I was telling what I had seen and could not believe she had not seen the people in the 
wash house; I thought she was lying in order to call me a liar. That anger and shame stayed a long time and made me 
unwilling to look at the people that other people didn't see or wouldn't talk about. When I saw them, I looked away until 
they were gone. I had thought they were all my kinfolk, people of my household, and seeing them had been 
companionship and pleasure to me; but now I felt I could not trust them, since they had got me into trouble. Of course 
I had it all backward, but there was nobody to help me get it straight. My family was not much given to thinking about 
things, and except for going to school, I went to our heyimas only in the Summer before the games. 

 When I turned away from all those people that I had used to see, they went on and did not come back. Only a few 
were left, and I was lonely. 

 I liked to be with my father, Olive of the Yellow Adobe, a man who talked little and was cautious and gentle in mind 
and hand. He repaired and reinstalled solar panels and collectors and batteries and lines and fixtures in houses and 
outbuildings; all his work was with the Miller's Art. He did not mind if I eame along if I was quiet, and so I went with 
him to be away from our noisy, busy household. When he saw that I liked his art, he began to teach it to me. My 
mothers were not enthusiastic about that. My Serpentine grandmother did not like having a Miller for son-in-law, and 
my mother wanted me to learn medicine. "If she has the third eye, she ought to put it to good use," they said, and they 
sent me to the Doctors Lodge on White Sulfur Creek to learn. Although I learned a good deal there and liked the 
teachers, I did not like the work and was impatient with the illnesses and accidents of mortality, preferring the 
dangerous, dancing energies my father worked with. I could often see the electrical current, and there were excitements 
of feeling, tones of a kind of sweet music barely to be heard, and tones also of voices speaking and singing, distant and 
hard to understand, that came when I worked with the batteries and wires. I did not speak of this to my father. If he felt 
and heard any of these things, he preferred to leave them unspoken, outside the house of words. 

 My childhood was like everybody's, except that with going to the Doctors Lodge and working with my father and 
liking to be alone, perhaps I played less with other children than many children do, after I was seven or eight years old. 
Also, though I went all over Telina with my father and knew all the ways and houses, we never went out of town. My 
family had no summer house and never even visited the hills. "Why leave Telina?" my grandmother would say. 
"Everything is here!" And in summer the town was pleasant, even when it was hot; so many people were away that 
there was never a crowd at the wash house, and houses standing empty were entirely different from houses full of 
people, and the ways and gardens and common places were lonesome and lazy and quiet. It was always in summer, 
often in the great heat of the afternoon, that I would see the people passing through Telina-na, coming upriver. They are 
hard to describe, and I have no idea who they were. They were rather short and walked quietly, alone, or three or four 
- one after the other; their limbs were smooth and their faces round, often with some lines or marks drawn on the lips or 
chin; their eyes were narrow, and sometimes looked swollen and sore as if from smoke or weeping. They would go 
quietly through the town, not looking at it and never speaking, going upriver. When I saw them I would always say the 
four heyas. The way they went, silently, gripped at my heart. They were far from me, walking in sorrow. 

 When I was nearly twelve years old, my cousin came of age, and the family gave a very big passage party far her, 
giving away all kinds of things I didn't even know we had. The following year I came of age, and we had another big 
party, though without such lavishness, as we didn't have so much left to give. I had entered the Blood Lodge just before 
the Moon, and the party for me was during the Summer Dance. At the end of the party, there were horse games and 
races, for the Summer people had come down from Chukulmas. 

 I had never been on horseback. The boys and girls who rode in the games and races for Telina brought a steady mare 
for me to ride and boosted me up to her back and put the rein in my hand, and off we went. I felt like the wild swan. 


That was pure joy. And I could share it with the other young people; we were all joined by the good feeling of the party 
and the excitement of the games and races and the beauty and passion of the horses, who thought it was all their festival. 
The mare taught me how to ride that day, and I was on horseback all night dreaming, and the next day, rode again; and 
on the third day I rode in a race, on a roan colt from a household in Chukulmas. The colt ran second in the big race 
when I rode him and ran first in the match race when the boy who had raised him rode him. In all that glory of festival 
and riding and racing and friendship, I left my childhood most joyously, but also I went out of my House, and got lost 
from too much being given me at once. I gave my heart to the red colt I rode and to the boy who rode him, a brother of 
the Serpentine of Chukulmas. 

 It was a long time ago and not his fault or doing; he did not know it. The word I write is my word; to myself let it be 
brought back. 

 So the Summer games were over in our town and the horse riders went off downriver to Madidinou and Ounmalin; 
and there I was, a thirteen-year-old woman and afoot. 

 I wore the undyed clothing I had been making all the year before, and I went often to the Blood Lodge, learning the 
songs and mysteries. Young people who had been friendly to me at the games remained friends, and when they found 
I longed to ride, they shared the horses of their households with me. I learned to play vetulou and helped with caring for 
the horses, who were stabled and pastured then northwest of Moon Creek in Halfhoof Pasture and on Butt Hill. I said at 
the Doctors Lodge that I wanted to learn horse doctoring, and so they sent me to learn that art by working with an old 
man, Striffen, who was a great doctor of horses and cattle, I would listen to him. He used different kinds of noises, 
words like the matrix words of songs, and different kinds of silences and breathing; and so did the animals. But I never 
could understand what they were saying. 

 Once when I came to the Obsidian heyimas for a Blood Lodge singing, a woman, I thought her old then, named 
Milk, met me in the passage. She looked at me with eyes as sharp and blind as a snake's eyes and said, "What are you 
here for?" 

 I answered her, "For the singing," and hurried by, but I knew that was not what she had asked. 

 In the summer I went with the dancers and riders of Telina to Chukulmas. There I met that boy, that young man. We 
talked about the roan horse and about the little moonhorse I was riding in the vetulou games. When he stroked the roan 
horse's flank, I did so too, and the side of my hand touched the side of his hand once. 

 Then there was another year until the Summer games returned. That was how it was to me: There was nothing I 
cared for or was mindful of but the Summer and the games. 

 The old horse doctor died on the first night of the Grass. I had gone to the Lodge Rejoining and learned the songs; I 
sang them for him. After he was burned I gave up learning his art. I could not talk with the animals or with any other 
people. I saw nothing clearly and listened to no one, I went back to working with my father, and I rode in the games in 
Summer. My cousin had a group of friends, girls who talked and played soulbone and dice, gambling for candy and 
almonds, sometimes for rings and earrings, and I hung around with them every evening, There were no real people in 
the world I saw at that time. All rooms were empty. Nobody was in the common places and gardens of Telina. Nobody 
walked upriver grieving. 

 When the sun turned south, the dancers and riders came again from Chukulmas to Telina, and I rode in the games 
and races, spending all day and night at the fields. People said, "That girl is in love with the roan stallion from 
Chukulmas," and teased me about it but not shamefully; everybody knows how adolescents fall in love with horses, 
and songs have been made about that love. But the horse knew what was wrong: He would no longer let me handle him. 

 In a few days the riders went on to Madidinou, and I stayed behind. 

 Things are very obstinate and stubborn, but also there is a sweet willingness in them: They offer what they meet, 
Electricity is like horses: crazy and willful and also willing and reliable. If you are careless and running counter, a horse 
or a live wire is a contrary and perilous thing. I burnt and shocked myself several times that year, and once I started a 
fire in the walls of a house by making a bad connection and not grounding the wires. They smelled the smoke and put 
out the fire before it did much harm, but my father, who had brought me into his Art as a novice, was so alarmed and 
angry that he forbade me to work with him until the next rainy season. 

 At the Wine that year I was fifteen years old. I got drunk for the first time. I went around town shouting and talking 
to people nobody else saw. So I was told next day, but I could not remember anything of it. I thought if I got drunk 
again, but a little less drunk, I might see the kind of people I used to see, when the ways were full of them and they kept 
my soul company. So I stole wine from our house neighbors, who had most of a barrel left in bottle after the dance, and 
I went down alone by the Na in the willow flats to drink it. 

 I drank the first bottle and made some songs, then I spilled most of the second bottle and went home and felt sick for 
a couple of days. I stole wine again, and this time I drank two bottles quickly. I made no songs. I felt dizzy and sick and 
fell asleep. Next morning I woke up there in the willow flats on the cold stones by the river, very weak and cold. My 
family was worried about me after that. It had been a hot night; so I could say I had stayed out for the cool and had 


fallen asleep, but my mother knew I was lying about something. She thought it must be that I had come inland with 
some boy but for some reason would not admit it. It shamed and worried her to think that I was wearing undyed 
clothing when I should no longer do so. It enraged me that she should so distrust me; yet I would say nothing to her in 
denial or explanation. My father knew that I was sick at heart, but it was soon after that that I set the fire, and his worry 
turned to anger. As for my cousin, she was in love with a Blue Clay boy and interested in nothing else; the girls with 
whom I gambled had taken to smoking a lot of hemp, which I never liked; and though the friends with whom I rode and 
looked after the horses were still kind, I did not want to be with humans much or even with horses. I did not want the 
world to be as it was. I had begun making up the world. 

 I made the world this way: That young man of my House in Chukulmas felt as I felt; and I would go to Chukulmas 
after the Grass this year. He and I would go up into the hills together and become forest-living people. We would take 
the roan stallion and go to Looks Up Valley, or farther; we would go to the grass dune country west of the Long Sound, 
where, he had once told me, the herds of wild horses run. He said that people went from Chukulmas sometimes to catch 
a wild horse there, but it was country where no human people lived. We would live there together alone, taming and 
riding the wild horses. Telling myself this world, in the daytime I made us live as brother and sister, but in the nights, 
lying alone, I made us make love together. The Grass came and passed; I put off going to Chukulmas, telling myself 
that it would be better to go after the Sun was danced. I had never danced the Sun as an adult, and I wanted to do that; 
after that, I told myself, I would go to Chukulmas. All along I knew that if I went or if I did not go it did not matter, and 
all I wanted to do was to die. 

 It is hard to say to yourself that what you want to do is die. You keep hiding it behind other things, which you 
pretend to want. I was impatient for the Twenty-One Days to begin, as if my life would start over with them. On the eve 
of the first day, I went to live at the heyimas. 

 As soon as I set foot on the ladder, my heart went cold and tight. There was a long-singing that night. My lips got 
numb, and my voice would not come out of my throat. I wanted to get out and run away, all night, but I did not know 
where to go. 

 Next morning three groups formed: One would go over the northwest range into wild country in silence; one would 
use hemp and mushrooms for trance; and one would drum and long-sing. 

 I could not choose which group to join, and this distressed me beyond anything. I began shaking, and went to the 
ladder but could not lift my foot to climb it. 

 The old doctor named Gall, who had taught me sometimes at the Doctors Lodge, came down the ladder. She was 
coming to sing, but the habit of her art distracted her, and she observed me. She turned back and said, "Are you not 
well?" 

 "I think I am ill." 

 "Why is that?" 

 "I want to dance and can't choose the dancing." 

 "The long-singing?" 

 "My voice is gone." 

 "The trances?" 

 "I'm afraid of them," 

 "The journey?" 

 "I can't leave this house!" I said loudly and began to shake again. 

 Gall put her head back with her chin sunk in her neck and looked at me from the tops of her eyes. She was a short, 
dark, wrinkled woman. She said, "You're already stretched. Do you want to break?" 

 "Maybe it would be better." 

 "Maybe it would be better to relax?" 

 "No it would be worse." 

 "There's a choice made. Come now." 

 Gall took my hand and brought me to the doorway of the inmost room of the heyimas, where the people of the Inner 
Sun were. 

 I said, "I can't go in there. I'm not old enough to begin the learning." 

 Gall said, "Your soul is old." She said the same to Black Oak, who came from the gyre to the doorway: "This is an 
old soul and a young one, stretching each other too hard." 

 Black Oak, who was then Speaker of the Serpentine, spoke with Gall, but I was not able to listen to what they said. 
As soon as we had come into the doorway of the inner room, my hair lifted up on my head, and my ears sang. I saw 
round, bright lights caming and going inside the room, where there was no light but the dim shaft from the topmost 
skylight. The light began to gyre. Black Oak turned to me and spoke, but at that time, as he spoke, the vision began. 

 I did not see the man Black Oak, but the Serpentine. It was a rock person, not man nor woman, not human, but in 


shape like a heavy human being, with the blue, blue-green, and black colors and the surfaces of serpentine rock in its 
skin. It had no hair, and its eyes were lidless and without transparency, seeing very slowly. Serpentine looked at me 
very slowly with those rock eyes. 

 I crouched down in terror. I could not weep or speak or stand or move. I was like a bag full of fear. All I could do 
was crouch there. I could not breathe at all until a stone, maybe Serpentine's hand, struck my head a hard blow on the 
right side, above the ear. It knocked me off balance and hurt very much, so that I whimpered and sobbed with the pain, 
and after that I could breathe again. My head did not bleed where it had been struck but began swelling up there. 

 I crouched, recovering from the blow and the dizziness, and after a long while looked up again. Serpentine was 
standing there. It stood there. After a while I saw the hands moving slowly. They moved up slowly and came together 
at the navel, at the middle of the stone. There they pulled back and apart. They pulled open a long, wide rent, or opening 
in the stone, like the doorway of a room into which I knew I was to enter. I got up crouching and shaking and took a 
step forward into the stone. 

 It was not like a room. It was stone, and I was in it. There was no light or breath or room. I think the rest of the vision 
all took place in the stone; that is where it all happened and was; but because of the human way human people have to 
see things, it seemed to change and to be other places, things, and beings. 

 As if the serpentine rock had crumbled and decayed into the red earth, after a while I was in the earth, part of the dirt. 
I could feel how the dirt felt. Presently I could feel rain coming into the dirt, coming down. I could feel it in a way that 
was like seeing, falling down on and into me, out of a sky that was all rain. 

 I would go to sleep and then be partly awake again, perceiving. I began feeling stones and roots, and along my left 
side I began to feel and hear cold water running, a creek in the rainy season. Veins of water underground went down 
and around through me to that creek, seeping in the dark through the dirt and stones, 

 Near the creek, I began to feel the big, deep roots of trees, and in the dirt everywhere, the fine, many roots of the 
grasses, the bulbs of brodiea and blue-eyed grass, the ground squirrel's heart beating, the mole asleep. I began to come 
up one of the great roots of a buckeye, up inside the trunk and out the leafless branches to the ends of the small outmost 
branches. From there I perceived the ladders of rain. These I climbed to the stairways of cloud. These I climbed to the 
paths of wind. There I stopped, for I was afraid to step out on the wind. 

 Coyote came down the wind path. She came like a thin woman with rough, dun hair on her head and arms, and a 
long, fine face with yellow eyes. Two of her children came with her, like coyote pups. 

 Coyote looked at me and said, "Take it easy. You can look down. You can look back." 

 I looked back and down under the wind. Below and behind me were dark ridges of forest with the rainbow shining 
across them, and light shining on the water on the leaves of the trees. I thought there were people on the rainbow but 
was not sure of that. Below and farther on were yellow hills of summer and a river among them going to the sea. In 
places the air below me was so full of birds that I could not see the ground, but only the light on their wings, 

 Coyote had a high, singing voice like several voices at once. She said, "Do you want to go on from here?" 

 I said, "I was going to go to the Sun." 

 "Go ahead. This is all my country." Coyote said that and then came past me on the wind, trotting on four legs as a 
coyote with her pups. I was standing alone on the wind there. So I went on ahead. 

 My steps on the wind were long and slow, like the Rainbow Dancers' steps. At each step the world below me looked 
different. At one step it was light; at the next one, dark. At the next step it was smoky; at the next, clear. At the next long 
step, black and gray clouds of ash or dust hid everything; and at the next, I saw a desert of sand with nothing growing or 
moving at all. I took a step, and everything on the surface of the world was one single town, roofs and ways with people 
swarming in them like the swarming in pond water under a lens. I took another step and saw the bottoms of the oceans 
laid dry, the lava slowly welling from long center seams, and huge desolate canyons far down in the shadow of the 
walls of the continents, like ditches below the walls of a barn. The next step I took, long and slow on the wind, I saw the 
surface of the world - blank, smooth, and pale, like the face of a baby I once saw that was born without forebrain or 
eyes. I took one more step and the hawk met me in the sunlight, in the quiet air, over the southwest slope of 
Grandmother Mountain. 

 It had been raining, and clouds were still dark in the northwest. The rain shone on the leaves of the forests in the 
canyons of the mountainside. 

 Of the vision given me in the Ninth House, I can tell some parts in writing, and some I can sing with the drum, but 
for most of it, I have not found words or music, though I have spent a good part of my life ever since learning how to 
look for them. I cannot draw what I saw, as my hand has no gift for making a likeness. 

 One reason it would be better drawn and is hard to tell is that there is no person in it. To tell a story, you say, "I did 
this" or "She saw that." When there is no I nor she, there is no story. I was, until I got to the Ninth House; there was the 
hawk, but I was not. The hawk was; the still air was. Seeing with the hawk's eyes is being without self. Self is mortal. 
That is the House of Eternity. 


 So of what the hawk's eyes saw, all I can here recall to words is this: 

 It was the universe of power. It was the network, field, and lines of the energies of all the beings, stars, and galaxies 
of stars, worlds, animals, minds, nerves, dust, the lace and foam of vibration that is being itself, all interconnected, 
every part part of another part, and the whole part of each part, and so comprehensible to itself only as a whole, 
boundless and unclosed. 

 At the Exchange it is taught that the electrical mental network of the City extends from all over the surface of the 
world out past the moon and the other planets to unimaginable distances among the stars: In the vision all that vast web 
was one momentary glitter of light on one wave on the ocean of the universe of power, one fleck of dust on one grass 
seed in unending fields of grass. The images of the light dancing on the waves of the sea or on dust motes, the glitter of 
light on ripe grass, the flicker of sparks from a fire, are all I have: No image can contain the vision, which contained all 
images. Music can mirror it better than words can, but I am no poet to make music of words. Foam and the scintillation 
of mica in rock, the flicker and sparkle of waves and dust, the working of the great broadcloth looms, and all dancing 
have reflected the hawk's vision for a moment to my mind; and indeed everything would do so, if my mind were clear 
and strong enough. But no mind or mirror can hold it without breaking. 

 There was a descent or drawing away, and I saw some things that I can describe. Here is one of them: In this lesser 
place or plane, which was what might be called the gods or the divine, beings enacted possibilities. These I, being 
human, recall as having human form. One of them came and shaped the vibrations of energies, closing their paths from 
gyre into wheel. This one was very strong and was crippled. He worked as blacksmith at the smithy, making wheels of 
energy, closed upon themselves, terrible with power, flaming. He who made them was burnt away by them to a shell of 
cinder, with eyes like a potter's kiln when it is opened and hair of burning wires, but still he turned the paths of energy 
and closed them into wheels, locking power into power. All around this being now was black and hollow where the 
wheels turned and ground and milled. There were other beings who came as if flying, like birds in a storm, flying and 
crying across the wheels of fire to stop the turning and the work, but they were caught in the wheels and burst like 
feathers of flame. The miller was a thin shell of darkness now, very weak, burnt out, and he too was caught in the 
wheels' turning and burning and grinding and was ground to dust, like fine, black meal. The wheels as they turned kept 
growing and joining until the whole machine was interlocked cog within cog, and strained and brightened and burst 
into pieces. Every wheel as it burst was a flare of faces and eyes and flowers and beasts on fire - burning, exploding, 
destroyed, falling into black dust. That happened, and it was one flicker of brightness and dark in the universe of power, 
a bubble of foam, a flick of the shuttle, a fleck of mica. The dark dust, or meal, lay in the shape of open curves or spirals. 
It began to move and shift, and there was a scintillation in it, like dust in a shaft of sunlight. It began dancing. Then the 
dancing drew away and drew away, and closer by, to the left, something was there, crying like a little animal. That was 
myself, my mind and being in the world; and I began to become myself again; but my soul that had seen the vision was 
not entirely willing. Only my mind kept drawing it back to me from the Ninth House, calling and crying for it till it 
came. 

 I was lying on my right side on earth, in a small, warm room with earthen walls. The only light came from the red 
bar of an electric heater. Somewhere nearby people were singing a two-note chant. I was holding in my left hand a rock 
of serpentine, greenish with dark markings, quite round as if waterworn, though serpentine does not often wear round, 
but splits and crumbles. It was just large enough that I could close my fingers around it. I held this round stone for a 
long time and listened to the chanting until I went to sleep. When I woke up, after a while I felt the rock going 
immaterial so that my fingers began sinking into it, and it weighed less and less, until it was gone. I was a little grieved 
by this, for I had thought it a remarkable thing to come back from the Right Arm of the World with a piece of it in my 
hand; but as I grew clearer headed, I perceived the vanity of that notion. Years later the rock came back to me. I was 
walking down by Moon Creek with my sons when they were small boys. The younger one saw the rock in the water 
and picked it up, saying, "A world!" I told him to keep it in his heya-box, which he did. When he died, I put that rock 
back in the water of Moon Creek. 

 I had been in the vision for the first two days and nights of the Twenty-One Days of the Sun. I was very weak and 
tired, and they kept me in the heyimas all the rest of the Twenty-One Days. I could hear the long-singing, and 
sometimes I went into other rooms of the heyimas; they made me welcome even in the inmost room, where they were 
singing and dancing the Inner Sun and where I had entered the vision. I would sit and listen and half-watch. But if I 
tried to follow the dancing with my eyes, or sing, or even touch the tongue-drum, the weakness would wash into me 
like a wave on sand, and I would go back into the little room and lie down on the earth, in the earth. 

 They waked me to listen to the Morning Carol; that was the first time in twenty-one days that I climbed the ladder 
and saw the sun, that day, the day of the Sun Rising. 

 The people dancing the Inner Sun had been in charge of me. They had told me that I was in danger and that if I 
approached another vision, I should try to turn away from it, as I was not strong enough for it yet. They had told me not 
to dance; and they kept bringing me food, so good and so kindly given that I could not refuse it, and ate it with 


enjoyment. After the Sun Risen days were past, certain scholars of the heyimas took me in their charge. Tarweed, a 
man of my House, and the woman Milk of the Obsidian, were my guides. It was now time that I begin to learn the 
recounting of the vision. 

 When I began, I thought there was nothing to learn. All I had to do was say what I had seen. 

 Milk worked with words, Tarweed worked with words, drum, and matrix chanting. They had me go very slowly, 
telling very little at a time, sometimes one word only, and repeating what I had been able to tell, singing it with the 
matrix chant so that as much as possible might be truly recalled and given and could be recalled and given again. 

 When I began thus to find out what it is to say what one has seen, and when the great oomplexity and innumerable 
vivid details of the vision overwhelmed my imagination and surpassed my ability to describe, I feared that I would lose 
it all before I could grasp one fragment of it and that even if I remembered some of it, I would never understand any of 
it. My guides reassured me and quieted my impatience. Milk said, "We have some training in this craft, and you have 
none. You have to learn to speak sky with an earth tongue. Listen: If a baby were carried up the Mountain, could she 
walk back down, until she learned to walk?" 

 Tarweed explained to me that as I learned to apprehend mentally what I had perceived in vision, I would approach 
the condition of living in both Towns; and so, he said, "there's no great hurry." 

 I said, "But it will take years and years!" 

 He said, "You've been at it for a thousand years already. Gall said you were an old soul." 

 It bothered me that I was often not sure whether Tarweed was joking or not joking. That always bothers young 
people, and however old my soul might be, my mind was fifteen. I had to live a while before I understood that a lot of 
things can only be said joking and not joking at the same time. I had to come clear back to Coyote's House from the 
Hawk's House to learn that, and sometimes I still forget it. 

 Tarweed's way was joking, shocking, stirring, but he was gentle; I had no fear of him. I had been afraid of Milk ever 
since she had looked at me in the Blood Lodge and said, "What are you here for?" She was a great scholar and was 
Singer of the Lodge. Her way was calm, patient, impersonal, but she was not gentle, and I feared her. With Tarweed 
she was polite, but it was plain that her manners masked contempt. She thought a man's place was in the woods and 
fields and workshops, not among sacred and intellectual things. In the Lodge I had heard her say the old gibe, "A man 
fucks with his brain and thinks with his penis." Tarweed knew well enough what she thought, but intellectual men are 
used to having their capacities doubted and their achievements snubbed; he did not seem to mind her arrogance as 
much as I sometimes did, even to the point of trying to defend him against her once, saying, "Even if he is a man, he 
thinks like a woman!" 

 It did no good, of course; and if it was partly true, it wasn't wholly true, because the thing that was most important of 
all to me I could not speak of to Tarweed, a man, and a man of my House: and to Milk, arrogant and stern as she was, 
and a woman who had lived all her life celibate, I did not even need to speak of it. I began to, once, feeling that I must, 
and she stopped me. "What is proper for me to know of this, I know," she said. "Vision is transgression! The vision is 
to be shared; the transgression cannot be." 

 I did not understand that. I was very much afraid of going out of the heyimas and being caught in my old life again, 
going the wrong way again in false thinking and despair. A half-month or so after the Sun, I began to feel and say that 
I was still weak and ill and could not leave the heyimas. To this Tarweed said, "Aha! About time for you to go home!" 

 I thought him most unfeeling. When I was working with Milk, in my worry I began crying, and presently I said, "I 
wish I had never had this vision!" 

 Milk looked at me, a glance across the eyes, like being whipped in the face with a thin branch. She said, "You did 
not have a vision." 

 I sniveled and stared at her. 

 "You had nothing. You have nothing. The house stands. You can live in a corner of it, or all of it, or go outside it as 
you choose." So Milk said and left me. 

 I stayed alone in the small room. I began to look at it, the small warm room with earth walls and floor and roof, 
underground. The walls were earth: the whole earth. Outside them was the sky: the whole sky. The room was the 
universe of power. I was in my vision. It was not in me. 

 So I went home to live and try to stay on the right way. 

 Part of most days I went to the heyimas to study with Tarweed or to the Blood Lodge to study with Milk. My health 
was sound, but I was still tired and sleepy, and my household did not get very much work out of me. All my family but 
my father were busy, restless people, eager to work and talk but never to be still. Among them, after the month in the 
heyimas, I felt like a pebble in a mountain creek, bounced and buffeted. But I could go to work with my father. Milk 
had suggested to him that he take me with him when he worked. Tarweed had questioned her about that, saying that the 
craft was spiritually dangerous, and Milk had replied, in the patient, patronizing tone she used to men, "Don't worry 
about that. It was danger that enabled her." 


 So I went back to working with power. I learned the art carefully and soberly, and set no more fires. I learned 
drumming with Tarweed, and speaking mystery with Milk. But it was all slow, slow, and my fear kept growing, fear 
and impatience. The image of the roan horse's rider was not in my mind, as it had been, but was the center of my fear, 
I never went to ride, and kept away from my friends who cared for the horses, and stayed out of the pastures where the 
horses were. I tried never to think about the Summer dancing, the games and races. I tried never to think about 
lovemaking, although my mother's sister had a new husband, and they made love every night in the next room with a 
good deal of noise. I began to fear and dislike myself, and fasted and purged to weaken myself. 

 I told Tarweed nothing of all this, shame preventing me; nor did I ever speak of it to Milk, fear preventing me, 

 So the World was danced, and next would come the Moon. The thought of that dance made me more and more 
frightened: I felt trapped by it. When the first night of the Moon came, I went down into my heyimas, meaning to stay 
there the whole time, closing my ears to the love songs. I started drumming a vision-tune that Tarweed had brought 
back from his dragonfly visions. Almost at once I entered trance and went into the house of anger. 

 In that house it was black and hot, with a yellowish glimmering like heat lightning and a dull muttering noise 
underfoot and in the walls. There was an old woman in there, very black, with too many arms. She called me, not by the 
name I then had. Berry, but Flicker: "Flicker, come here! Flicker, come here!" I understood that Flicker was my name, 
but I did not come. 

 The old woman said, "What are you sulking about? Why don't you go fuck with your brother in Chukulmas? Desire 
unacted is corruption. Must Not is a slave owner, Ought Not is a slave. Energy constrained turns the wheels of evil. 
Look what you're dragging with you! How can you run the gyre, how can you handle power, chained like that? 
Superstition! Superstition!" 

 I found that my legs were both fastened with bolts and hasps to a huge boulder of serpentine rock so that I could not 
move at all. I thought that if I fell down, the boulder would roll on me and crush me. 

 The old woman said, "What are you wearing on your head? That's no Moon Dance veil. Superstition! Superstition!" 

 I put up my hands and found my head covered with a heavy helmet made of black obsidian. I was seeing and hearing 
through this black, murky glass, which came down over my eyes and ears. 

 "Take it off, Flicker!" the old woman said. 

 I said, "Not at your bidding!" 

 I could hardly see or hear her as the helmet pressed heavier and thicker on my head and the boulder pushed against 
my legs and back. 

 She cried, "Break free! You are turning into stone! Break free!" 

 I would not obey her. I chose to disobey. With my hands I pressed the obsidian helmet into my ears and eyes and 
forehead until it sank in and became part of me, and I pushed myself back into the boulder until it became part of my 
legs and body. Then I stood there, very stiff and heavy and hard, but I could walk, and I could see and hear, now that the 
dark glass was not over my ears and eyes but was part of them. I saw that the house was all on fire, burning and 
smoldering, floor, walls, and roof. A black bird, a crow, was flying in the smoke from one room to the next. The old 
woman was burning, her clothes and flesh and hair smoldering. The crow flew around her and cried to me, "Sister, get 
out, you'd better get out!" 

 There is nothing but anger in the house of anger. I said, "No!" 

 The crow cawed, saying, "Sister, fetch water, water of the spring!" Then it flew out through the burning wall of the 
house. Just as it went, it looked back at me with a man's face, beautiful and strong, with curly, fiery hair streaming 
upward. Then the walls of fire sank down into the walls of the Serpentine heyimas where I was sitting drumming on the 
three-note drum. I was still drumming, but a different pattern, a new one. 

 After that vision, I was called Flicker; the scholars agreed that it's best to use the name that that Grandmother gives 
you, even if you don't do what she says. After that vision, I went up to the Springs of the River, as Crow had said to do; 
and after it I was freed from my fear of my desire. 

 The central vision is central; it is not for anything outside itself; indeed there is nothing outside it. What I beheld in 
the Ninth House is, as a cloud or a mountain is. We make use of such visions, make meanings out of them, find images 
in them, live on them, but they are not for us or about us any more than the world is. We are part of them. There are 
other kinds of vision, all farther from the center and nearer to the mortal self; one of those is the turning vision, which 
is about a person's own life. The vision in which that Grandmother named me was a turning vision. 

 The Summer came, and the people came down from Chukulmas. My brother of the Serpentine did not ride his roan 
horse in the races; a girl of the Obsidian of Chukulmas rode that horse, and he rode a sorrel mare. The roan stallion won 
all races and was much praised. After that summer he would race no more, but be put to stud, they said. I did not ride, 
but watched the races and the games. It is hard to say how I felt. My throat ached all the time, and I kept saying silentiy 
inside myself, goodbye, goodbye! But what I was saying goodbye to was already gone. I was mourning and yet 
unmoved. The girl was a good rider, and beautiful, and I thought maybe they are going to come inland together; but it 


did not hurt or concern me. What I wanted was to be gone from Telina, to begin living the life that followed the turning 
vision, that followed the gyre. 

 So in the heat of the summertime I went with Tarweed upriver, to the Springs of the River at Wakwaha. 

 On the Mountain I lived in the host-house of the Serpentine, and worked mostly as electrician's assistant at odd jobs 
around the sacred buildings and the Archive and Exchange. In the morning I would come outdoors at sunrise. All 
beyond and below the porch of that house I would see a vast pluming blankness, the summer fog filling the Valley, 
while the first rays of the sun brightened the rocks of the Mountain's peaks above me, and I would sing as I had been 
taught: 

 "It is the Valley of the puma, 

 where the lion walks, 

 where the lion wakes, 

 shining, shining in the Seventh House!" 

 

 Later, in the rainy season, the puma walked on the Mountain itself, darkening the summits and the Springs in cloud 
and gray mist. To wake in the silence of that rainless, all-concealing fog was to wake to dream, to breathe the lion's 
breath. 

 Much of each day on the Mountain I spent in the heyimas, and at times slept there. I worked with the scholars and 
visionaries of Wakwaha at the techniques of revisioning, of recounting, and of music. I did not practice dancing or 
painting much, as I had no gift for them, but practiced recalling and recounting in spoken and written language and 
with the drum. 

 I had, as many people have, exaggerated notions of how visionaries live. I expected a strained, athletic, ascetic 
existence, always stretched towards the ineffable. In fact, it was a dull kind of life. When people are in vision, they can't 
look after themselves, and when they come back from it, they may be extremely tired, or excited and bewildered, and in 
either case, need quietness without distractions and demands. In other words, it's like childbearing or any hard, intense 
work. One supports and protects the worker. Revisioning and recounting are much the same, though not quite so hard. 

 In the host-house I fasted only before the great wakwa; I ate lightly, with some care of which foods I ate, and drank 
little wine and watered it. If you are going into vision or revision, you don't want to keep changing yourself and going 
in a different way - through starving one time, the next time through drunkenness, or cannabis, or trance-singing, or 
whatever. What you want is moderation and continuity. If one is an ecstatic, of course it's another matter; that is not 
work but burning. 

 So the life I led in Wakwaha was dull and peaceful, much the same from day to day and season to season, and suited 
and pleased my mind and heart so that I desired nothing else. All the work I did in those years on the Mountain was 
revisioning and recounting the vision of the Ninth House that had been given me; I gave all I could of it to the scholars 
of the Serpentine for their records and interpretations, in which our guidance as a people lies. They were kind, true kin, 
family of my House, and I at last a child of that House again, not self-exiled. I thought I had come home and would live 
there all my life, telling and drumming, going into vision and coming back from it, dancing in the beautiful dancing 
place of the Five High Houses, drinking from the Springs of the River. 

 The Grass was late in the third year I lived in Wakwaha. Some days after it ended and some days before the 
Twenty-One Days began, I was about to go up the ladder of the Serpentine heyimas when Hawk Woman came to me. 
I thought she was one of the people of the heyimas, until she cried the hawk's cry, "kiyir, kiyir!" I turned, and she said, 
"Dance the Sun upon the Mountain, Flicker, and after that go down. Maybe you should learn how to dye cloth." She 
laughed, and flew up as the hawk through the entrance overhead. 

 Other people came where I was standing at the foot of the ladder. They had heard the hawk's cry, and some saw her 
fly up through the entrance of the heyimas. 

 After that I had neither vision nor revision of the Ninth House or any house or kind. 

 I was bereft and relieved. That terrible grandeur had been hard to bear, to bring back, to share and give and lose over 
and over. It had all been beyond my strength, and I was not sorry to cease revisioning. But when I thought that I had lost 
all vision and must soon leave Wakwaha, I began to grieve. I thought about those people whom I had thought were my 
kinfolk, long ago when I was a child, before I was afraid. They were gone, and now I too must go, leaving these kinfolk 
of my House of Wakwaha, and go live among strangers the rest of my life. 

 A woman-living man of the Serpentine of Wakwaha, Deertongue, who had taught me and sung with me and given 
me friendship, saw that I was downcast and anxious, and said to me, "Listen. You think everything is done. Nothing is 
done. You think the door is shut. No door is shut. What did Coyote say to you at the beginning of it all?" 

 I said, "She said to take it easy." 

 Deertongue nodded his head and laughed. 

 I said, "But Hawk said to go down." 


 "She didn't say not to come back." 

 "But I have lost the visions!" 

 "But you have your wits! Where is the center of your life, Flicker?" 

 I thought, not very long, and answered, "There. In that vision. In the Ninth House." 

 He said, "Your life turns on that center. Only don't blind your intellect by hankering after vision! You know that the 
vision is not your self. The hawk turns upon the hawk's desire. You will come round home and find the door wide 
open." 

 I danced the Sun upon the Mountain, as Hawk Woman had said to do, and after that I began to feel that I must go. 
There were some people living in Wakwaha who sought vision or ecstasy by continuous fasting or drug taking, and 
lived in hallucination; such people came not to know vision from imagination and lived without honesty, making up the 
world all the time. I was afraid that if I stayed there I might begin imitating them, as Deertongue had warned me. After 
all, I had gone wrong that way once before. So I said goodbye to people, and on a cold, bright morning I went down the 
Mountain. A young redtail hawk circled, crying over the canyons, "kiyir! kiyir!" so mournfully that I cried myself. 

 I went back to my mothers' household in Telina-na. My uncle had married and moved out, so I had his small room to 
myself; that was a good thing, since my cousin had married and had a child, and the household was as crowded and 
restless as ever. I went back to work with my father, learning both theory and practice with him, and after two years I 
became a member of the Millers Art. He and I continued to work together often. My life was nearly as quiet as it had 
been in Wakwaha. Sometimes I would spend days in the heyimas drumming; there were no visions, but the silence 
inside the drumming was what I wanted. 

 So the seasons went along, and I was thinking about what Hawk Woman had said. I was rewiring an old house, 
Seven Steps House in the northeast arm of Telina, and while I was working there on a hot day, a man of one of the 
households brought me some lemonade, and we fell to talking, and so again the next day. He was a Blue Clay man from 
Chukulmas who had married a Serpentine woman of Telina. They had been given two children, the younger born sevai. 
She had left the children with him and left her mothers' house, going across town to marry a Red Adobe man. I knew 
her, she was one of the people I had gambled with as a child, but I had never talked to this man, Stillwater, who lived in 
his children's grandmother's house. He worked mostly as a chemist and tanner and housekeeper. We talked and got on 
well and met to talk again. I came inland with him, and we decided to marry. 

 My father was against it, because Stillwater had two children in his household already and so I would bear none; but 
that was what I wanted. My grandmother and mother were not heartily for anything I did, because I had always 
disappointed them, and they did not want three more people in our house, which was crowded enough. But that, too, 
was what I wanted. Everything I wanted in those years came to be. 

 Stillwater and the little boys and I made a household on the ground floor of Seven Steps House, where their 
grandmother lived on the first floor. She was a lazy, sweet-tempered woman, very fond of Stillwater and the children, 
and we got on very well. We lived in that house fourteen years. All that time I had what I wanted and was contented, 
like a ewe with two lambs in a safe pasture, with my head down eating the grass. All that time was like a long day in 
summer, in the fenced fields, or in a quiet house when the doors are closed to keep the rooms cool. That was my life's 
day. Before it and after it were the twilights and the dark, when things and the shadows of things become one. 

 Our elder son - and this was a satisfaction to my grandmother at last - went to learn with the Doctors Lodge on 
White Sulfur Creek as soon as he entered his sprouting years, and by the time he was twenty he was living at the Lodge 
much of the time. The younger died when he had lived sixteen years. Living with his pain and always increasing 
weakness and seeing him lose the use of his hands and the sight in his eyes had driven his brother to seek to be a healer, 
but living with his fearless soul had been my chief joy. He was like a little hawk that came into one's hands for the 
warmth, for a moment, fearless and harmless, but hurt. After he died, Stillwater lost heart, and began longing for his old 
home. Presently he went back to Chukulmas to live in his mothers' house. Sometimes I went to visit him there. 

 I went back to my childhood home, my mothers' house, where my grandmother and mother and father and aunt and 
cousin and her husband and two children were. They were still busy and noisy; it was not where I wanted to be. I would 
go to the heyimas and drum, but that was not what I wanted, either. I missed Stillwater's company, but it was no longer 
the time for us to live together; that was done. It was something else wanted, but I could not find out what. 

 In the Blood Lodge one day they told me that Milk, who was now truly an old woman, had had a stroke. My son 
came with me to see her and helped her in her recovery; and since she was alone, I went to stay with her while she 
needed help. It suited her to have me there, and so I lived with her. It was comfortable for both of us; but she was 
looking for her last name and learning how to die, and although I could be of some help to her while she did that and 
could learn from her, it wasn't what I wanted myself, yet. 

 One day a little before the Summer I was working in the storage barns above Moon Creek. The Art had put in a new 
generator there, and I was checking out the wiring to the threshers, some of which needed reinsulation; the mice had 
been at it. I was working away there in a dark, dusty crawl space, hearing the mice scuttering about overhead in the 


rafters and between the walls. Presently I noticed with part of my attention that several people were in the crawl space 
with me, watching what I was doing. They were grayish-brown people with long, slender, white hands and feet and 
bright eyes: I had never seen them before, but they seemed familiar. I said, while I went on working. "I wish you would 
not take the insulation off the wires. A fire could start. There must be better things to eat in a grain barn!" 

 The people laughed a little, and the darkest one said in a high soft voice, "Bedding." 

 They looked behind them then and went away quickly and quietly. Somebody else was there. I felt one little chill of 
fear. At first I couldn't see him clearly in that twilight of the crawl space; then I saw it was Tarweed. 

 "You never ride horses anymore, Flicker," he said. 

 "Riding is for the young, Tarweed," I said. 

 "Are you old?" 

 "Nearly forty years old." 

 "And you don't miss riding?" 

 He was teasing me, as people had teased me once about being in love with the roan horse. 

 "No, I don't miss that." 

 "What do you miss?" 

 "My child that died." 

 "Why should you miss him?" 

 "He is dead." 

 "So am I," said Tarweed. And so he was. He had died five years ago. 

 So I knew then what it was I missed, what I wanted. It was only not to be shut into the House of Earth. I did not have 
to go in and out the doors, if only I could see those who did. There was Tarweed, and he laughed a little, like the mice. 

 He did not say anything more, but watched me in the shadows. 

 When I was done with the work, he was gone. 

 When I left the barn, I saw the barn owl high upon a rafter, sleeping. 

 I went home to Milk's household. I told her at supper about Tarweed and the mice. 

 She listened and began to cry a little. She was weak since the stroke, and her fierceness sometimes turned to tears. 
She said. "You were always ahead of me, going ahead of me!" 

 I had never known that she envied me. It made me sad to know it, and yet I wanted to laugh at the way we waste our 
feelings. "Somebody has to open the door!" I said. I showed her the people who were coming into the room, the kind of 
people I used to see when I was a young child. I knew they were indeed my kin, but I did not know who they were. I 
asked Milk, "Who are they?" 

 She was bewildered at first and could not see well, and complained. The people began to speak, and after a while 
she answered them. Sometimes they spoke this language, and sometimes I did not understand what they said; but she 
answered them eagerly. 

 When she grew tired, they went away quietly, and I helped her to bed. As she began to go to sleep, I saw a little child 
come and lie down beside her. She put her arms around it. Every night after that until Milk died in the winter, the child 
came to her bed to sleep. 

 Once I spoke of it, saying, "your daughter." Milk looked at me with that whipping look in her one good eye. She said, 
"Not my daughter. Yours." 

 So I keep that house now, with the daughter I never bore, the child of my first love, and with others of my family. 
Sometimes when I sweep the floor of that house, I see the dust in a shaft of sunlight, dancing in curves and spirals, 
flickering. 

 


Unlocking The Air 

fiction By URSULA K. LE GUIN 

 

 

THIS IS A FAIRY TALE. People stand in the lightly falling snow. Something 

is shining, trembling, making a silvery sound. Eyes are shining. Voices 

sing. People laugh and weep, clasp one another�s hands, embrace. 

 

Something shines and trembles. They live happily ever after. The snow falls on 

the roofs and blows across the parks, the squares, the river. 

 

This is history. Once upon a time, a good king lived in his palace in a 

kingdom far away. But an evil enchantment fell upon that land. The wheat 

withered in the ear, the leaves dropped from the trees of the forest and 

nothing thrived. 

 

This is a stone. It�s a paving stone of a square that slants downhill in 

front of an old, reddish, almost windowless fortress called the Roukh Palace. 

The square was paved nearly 300 years ago, so a lot of feet have walked on 

this stone, bare feet and shod, children�s little pads, horses� iron shoes, 

soldiers� boots; and wheels have gone over and over it, cart wheels, carriage 

wheels, car tires, tank treads. Dogs� paws every now and then. There has been 

dogshit on it, there has been blood, both soon washed away by water sloshed 

from buckets or run from hoses or dropped from the clouds. 

You can�t get blood from a stone, they say, nor can you give it to a 

stone; it takes no stain. Some of the pavement, down near that street that 

leads out of Roukh Square through the old Jewish quarter to the river, got dug 

up, once or twice, and piled into a barricade, and some of the stones even 

found themselves flying through the air, but not for long. They were soon put 

back in their place, or replaced by others. It made no difference to them. The 

man hit by the flying stone dropped down like a stone beside the stone that 

had killed him. The man shot through the brain fell down and his blood ran out 

on this stone, or another one maybe; it makes no difference to them. The 

soldiers washed his blood away with water sloshed from buckets, the buckets 

their horses drank from. The rain fell after a while. The snow fell. Bells rang 

the hours, the Christmases, the New Years. A tank stopped with its treads on 

this stone. You�d think that that would leave a mark, a huge heavy thing like a 

tank, but the stone shows nothing. Only all the feet bare and shod over the 

centuries have worn a quality into it, not a smoothness, exactly, but a kind of 

softness, like leather or like skin. Unstained, unmarked, indifferent, it does 

have that quality of having been worn for a long time by life. So it is a stone 
of 

power, and who sets foot on it may be transformed. 

 

This is a story. She let herself in with her key and called, "Mama? It�s 

me, Fana!" 

 

And her mother, in the kitchen of the apartment, called, "I�m in here," 

and they met and hugged in the doorway of the kitchen. 

 

"Come on, come on!" 

 

"Come where?" 

 

"It�s Thursday, Mama!" 

 

"Oh," said Bruna Fabbre, retreating toward the stove, making vague 


protective gestures at the saucepans, the dishcloths, the spoons. 

 

"You said." 

 

"But it�s nearly four already--" 

 

"We can be back by six-thirty." 

 

"I have all the papers to read for the advancement tests." 

 

"You have to come, Mama. You do. You�ll see!" 

 

A heart of stone might resist the shining eyes, the coaxing, the 

bossiness. "Come on` she said, and the mother came. 

But grumbling. "This is for you," she said on the stairs. 

On the bus, she said it again. "This is for you. Not me. 

"What makes you think that?" 

 

Bruna did not reply for a while, looking out the bus window at the gray 

city lurching by, the dead November sky behind the roofs. 

 

"Well, you see," she said, "before Kasi, my brother Kasimir, before he 

was killed, that was the time that would have been for me. But I was too 

young. Too stupid. And then they killed Kasi." 

 

"By mistake." 

 

"It wasn�t a mistake. They were hunting for a man who�d been getting 

people out across the border, and they�d missed him. So it was to. . . ." 

 

"To have something to report to the Central Office." 

Bruna nodded. "He was about the age you are now," she said. The bus 

stopped, people climbed on, crowding the aisle. "Since then, twenty-seven 

years, always since then, it�s been too late. For me. First too stupid, then too 

late. This time is for you. I missed mine." 

 

"You�ll see," Stefana said. "There�s enough time to go round." 

 

 

 

This is history. Soldiers stand in a row before the reddish, almost 

windowless palace; their muskets are at the ready. Young men walk across the 

stones toward them, singing, "Beyond this darkness is the light, 0 Liberty, of 

thine eternal day!" 

The soldiers fire their guns. The young men live happily ever after. 

 

This is biology. 

 

"Where the hell is everybody?" 

 

"It�s Thursday," Stefan Fabbre said, adding, "Damn!" as the figures on 

the computer screen jumped and flickered. He was wearing his topcoat over 

sweater and scarf, since the biology laboratory was heated only by a space 

heater that shorted out the computer circuit if they were on at the same time. 

 

"There are programs that could do this in two seconds," he said, jabbing 

morosely at the keyboard. 


Avelin came up and glanced at the screen. "What is it?" 

 

"The RNA comparison count. I could do it faster on my fingers." 

Avelin, a bald, spruce, pale, dark-eyed man of 40, roamed the 

laboratory, looked restlessly through a folder of reports. "Can�t run a 

university with this going on," he said. "I�d have thought you�d be down 

there." 

Fabbre entered a new set of figures and said, "Why?" 

 

"You�re an idealist." 

 

"Am l?" Fabbre leaned back, rolled his head to get the cricks out. "I try 

hard not to be," he said. 

 

"Realists are born, not made." The younger man sat down on a lab 

stool and stared at the scarred, stained counter. "It�s coming apart," he said. 

 

"You think so? Seriously?" 

Avelin nodded. "You heard that report from Prague." 

Fabbre nodded. 

 

"Last week . . . this week . . . next year--yes. An earthquake. The 

stones come apart--it falls apart--there was a building, now there�s not. 

History is made. So, I don�t understand why you�re here, not there." 

 

"Seriously, you don�t understand?" 

Avelin smiled and said, "Seriously." 

 

"All right." Fabbre stood up and began walking up and down the long 

room as he spoke. He was a slight gray-haired man with youthfully intense, 

controlled movements. "Science or political activity, either/or: Choose. Right? 

Choice is responsibility, right? So I chose my responsibility responsibly. I 

chose science and abjured all action but the acts of science. The acts of a 

responsible science. Out there, they can change the rules; in here, they can�t 

change the rules; when they try to, I resist. This is my resistance." He slapped 

the laboratory bench as he turned round. "I�m lecturing. I walk up and down 

like this when I lecture. So. Background of the choice. I�m from the northeast. 

Fifty-six, in the northeast, do you remember? My grandfather, my 

father-reprisals. So, in Sixty, I come here, to the university. Sixty-two, my 

best friend, my wife�s brother. We were walking through a village market, 

talking, then he stopped, he stopped talking, they had shot him. A kind of 

mistake. Right? He was a musician. A realist. I felt that I owed it to him, that 
I 

owed it to them, you see, to live carefully, with responsibility, to do the best 
I 

could do. The best I could do was this," and he gestured around the 

laboratory. "I�m good at it. So I go on trying to be a realist. As far as possible, 

under the circumstances, which have less and less to do with reality. But they 

are only circumstances. Circumstances in which I do my work as carefully as I 

can." 

 

Avelin sat on the lab stool, his head bowed. When Fabbre was done, 

he nodded. After a while, he said, "But I have to ask you if it�s realistic to 

separate the circumstances, as you put it, from the work." 

 

"About as realistic as separating the body from the mind," Fabbre said. 

He stretched again and reseated himself at the computer. "I want to get this 


series in," he said, and his hands went to the keyboard and his gaze to the 

notes he was copying. After five or six minutes, he started the printer and 

spoke without turning. "You�re serious, Givan? You think it�s coming apart?" 

 

"Yes. I think the experiment is over." 

The printer scraped and screeched, and they raised their voices to be 

heard. 

 

"Here, you mean." 

 

"Here and everywhere. They know it, down at Roukh Square. Go down 

there. You�ll see. There could be such jubilation only at the death of a tyrant 
or 

the failure of a great hope." 

 

"Or both." 

 

"Or both," Avelin agreed. 

The paper jammed in the printer, and Fabbre opened the machine to 

free it. His hand was shaking. Avelin, spruce and cool, hands behind his back, 

strolled over, looked, reached in, disengaged the corner that was jamming the 

feed. 

 

"Soon," he said, "we�ll have an IBM. A Mactoshin. Our hearts� desire." 

 

"Macintosh," Fabbre said. 

 

"Everything can be done in two seconds." 

Fabbre restarted the printer and looked around. "Listen, the 

principles� 

Avelin�s eyes shone strangely, as if full of tears; he shook his head. 

 

"So much depends on the circumstances," he said. 

 

 

This is a key. It locks and unlocks a door, the door to apartment 2-1 of 

the building at 43 Pradinestrade in the Old North Quarter of the city of 

Krasnoy. The apartment is enviable, having a kitchen with saucepans, 

dislicloths, spoons and all that is necessary, and two bedrooms, one of which 

is now used as a sitting room, with chairs, books, papers and all that is 

necessary, as well as a view from the window between other buildings of a 

short section of the Molsen River. The river at this moment is lead-colored and 

the trees above it are bare and black. The apartment is unlighted and empty. 

When they left, Bruna Fabbre locked the door and dropped the key, which is 

on a steel ring along with the key to her desk at the lyceum and the key to her 

sister Bendika�s apartment in the Trasfiuve, into her small imitation leather 

handbag, which is getting shabby at the corners, and snapped the handbag 

shut. Bruna�s daughter Stefana has a copy of the key in her jeans pocket, tied 

on a bit of braided cord along with the key to the closet in her room in 

dormitory G of the University of Krasnoy, where she is a graduate student in 

the department of Orsinian and Slavic Literature, working for a degree in the 

field of early romantic poetry. She never locks the closet. The two women walk 

down Pradinestrade three blocks and wait a few minutes at the corner for the 

number 18 bus, which runs on Bulvard Settentre from North Krasnoy to the 

center of the city. 

 

Pressed in the crowded interior of the handbag and the tight warmth of 


the jeans pocket, the key and its copy are inert, silent, forgotten. All a key can 

do is lock and unlock its door; that�s all the function it has, all the meaning; 
it 

has a responsibility but no rights. It can lock or unlock. It can be found or 

thrown away. 

 

 

This is history. Once upon a time, in 1830, in 1848, in 1866, in 1918, 

in 1947, in 1956, stones flew. Stones flew through the air like pigeons, and 

hearts, too; hearts had wings. Those were the years when the stones flew, the 

hearts took wing, the young voices sang. The soldiers raised their muskets to 

the ready, the soldiers aimed their rifles, the soldiers poised their machine 

guns. They were young, the soldiers. They fired. The stones lay down, the 

pigeons fell. There�s a kind of red stone called pigeon blood, a ruby. The red 

stones of Roukh Square were never rubies; slosh a bucket of water over them 

or let the rain fall and they�re gray again, lead-gray, common stones. Only 

now and then, in certain years, they have flown, and turned to rubies. 

 

 

This is a bus. Nothing to do with fairy tales and not romantic; certainly 

realistic; though, in a way, in principle, in fact, it is highly idealistic. A city 
bus, 

crowded with people, in a city street in central Europe on a November 

afternoon and it�s stalled. What else? Oh, dear. Oh, damn. But no, it hasn�t 

stalled; the engine, for a wonder, hasn�t broken down; it�s just that it can�t go 

any farther. Why not? Because there�s a bus stopped in front of it, and another 

one stopped in front of that one at the cross street, and it looks like everything 

has stopped. Nobody on this bus has heard the word gridlock, the name of an 

exotic disease of the mysterious West. There aren�t enough private cars in 

Krasnoy to bring about a gridlock even if they knew what it was. There are 

cars, and a lot of wheezing, idealistic buses, but all there is enough of to stop 

the flow of traffic in Krasnoy is people. It is a kind of equation, proved by 

experiments conducted over many years, perhaps not in a wholly scientific or 

objective spirit but nonetheless presenting a well-documented result confirmed 

by repetition: There are not enough people in this city to stop a tank. Even in 

much larger cities, it has been authoritatively demonstrated as recently as last 

spring that there are not enough people to stop a tank But there are enough 

people in this city to stop a bus, and they are doing so. Not by throwing 

themselves in front of it, waving banners or singing songs about Liberty�s 

eternal day, but merely by being of the g in the street, getting in the way bus, 

on the supposition that the bus driver has not been trained in either homicide 

or suicide, and on the same supposition-upon which all cities stand or fall-that 

they are also getting in the way of all the other buses and all the cars and in 

one another�s way, too, so that nobody is going much of anywhere, in a 

physical sense. 

 

"We�re going to have to walk from here," Stefana said, and her mother 

clutched her imitation-leather handbag 

 

"Oh, but we can�t, Fana. Look at that crowd! What are they�Are 

they�" 

 

"It�s Thursday, ma�am," said a large, red-faced, smiling man just 

behind them in the aisle. Everybody was getting off the bus, pushing and 

talking. 

 

"Yesterday, I got four blocks closer than this," a woman said crossly. 


And the red-faced man said, "Ah, but this is Thursday." 

 

"Fifteen thousand last time," said somebody. 

And somebody else said, "Fifty, fifty thousand today!" 

 

"We can never get near the Square. I don�t think we should try," 

Bruna told her daughter as they squeezed into the crowd outside the bus door. 

 

"You stay with me, don�t let go and don�t worry," said the student of 

Early Romantic Poetry, a tall, resolute young woman, and she took her 

mother�s hand in a firm grasp. "It doesn�t really matter where we get, but it 

would be fun if you could see the Square. Let�s try. Let�s go round behind the 

post office." 

 

Everybody was trying to go in the same direction. Stefana and Bruna 

got across one street by dodging and stopping and pushing gently, then 

turning against the flow, they trotted down a nearly empty alley, cut across 

the cobbled court in back of the Central Post Office and rejoined an even 

thicker crowd moving slowly down a wide street and out from between the 

buildings. "There, there�s the palace, see!" said Stefana, who could see it, 

being taller. "This is as far as we�ll get except by osmosis." They practiced 

osmosis, which necessitated letting go of each other�s hands and made Bruna 

unhappy. 

 

"This is far enough, this is fine here," Bruna kept saying. "I can see 

everything. There�s the roof of the palace. Nothing�s going to happen, is it? I 

mean, will anybody speak?" It was not what she meant, but she did not want 

to shame her daughter with her fear, her daughter who had not been alive 

when the stones turned to rubies. And she spoke quietly because although 

there were so many people pressed and pressing into Roukh Square, they 

were not noisy. They talked to one another in ordinary, quiet voices. Only now 

and then, somebody down nearer the palace shouted out a name, and then 

many other voices would repeat it with a roll and crash like a wave breaking. 

Then they would be quiet again, murmuring vastly, like the sea between big 

waves. 

 

The streetlights had come on. Roukh Square was sparsely lighted by 

tall, old cast-iron standards with double globes that shed a soft light high in 

the air. Through that serene light, which seemed to darken the sky, came 

drifting small, dry flecks of snow. 

 

The flecks melted to droplets on Stefana�s dark short hair and on the 

scarf Bruna had tied over her fair short hair to keep her ears warm. 

When Stefana stopped at last, Bruna stood up as tall as she could, and 

because they were standing on the highest edge of the Square, in front of the 

old dispensary, by craning, she could see the great crowd, the faces like 

snowflakes, countless. She saw the evening darkening, the snow falling, and 

no way out, and no way home. She was lost in the forest. The palace, whose 

few lighted windows shone dully above the crowd, was silent. No one came 

out, no one went in. It was the seat of government; it held the power. It was 

the powerhouse, the powder magazine, the bomb. Power had been 

compressed, jammed into those old reddish walls, packed and forced into 

them over years, over centuries, till if it exploded, it would burst with horrible 

violence, hurling pointed shards of stone, And out here in the twilight, in the 

open, there was nothing but soft faces with shining eyes, soft little breasts and 

stomachs and thighs protected only by bits of cloth. 

She looked down at her feet on the pavement. They were cold. She 


would have worn her boots if she had thought it was going to snow, if Fana 

hadn�t hurried her so. She felt cold, lost, lonely to the point of tears. She set 

her jaw and set her lips and stood firm on her cold feet on the cold stone. 

There was a sound, sparse, sparkling, faint, like the snow crystals. The 

crowd had gone quite silent, swept by low laughing murmurs, and through the 

silence ran that small, discontinuous silvery sound. 

 

"What is that?" asked Bruna, beginning to smile. "Why are they doing 

that?" 

 

 

This is a committee meeting. Surely you don�t want me to describe a 

committee meeting? It meets as usual on Friday at I I in the morning in the 

basement of the Economics Building. At 11 on Friday night, however, it is still 

meeting, and there are a good many onlookers, several million, in fact, thanks 

to the foreigner with the camera, a television camera with a long snout, a 

one-eyed snout that peers and sucks up what it sees. The cameraman focuses 

for a long time on the tall dark-haired girl who speaks so eloquently in favor of 

a certain decision concerning bringing a certain man back to the capital. But 

the millions of onlookers will not understand her argument, which is spoken in 

her obscure language and is not translated for them. All they will know is how 

the eye snout of the camera lingered on her young face, sticking it. 

 

 

This is a love story. Two hours later, the cameraman was long gone, 

but the committee was still meeting. 

 

"No, listen," she said, "seriously, this is the moment when the betrayal 

is always made. Free elections, yes; but if we don�t look past that now, when 

will we? And who�ll do it? Are we a country or a client state changing patrons?" 

 

"You have to go one step at a time, consolidating�" 

 

"When the dam breaks? You have to shoot the rapids! All at once!" 

 

"It�s a matter of choosing direction�" 

 

"Exactly, direction. Not being carried senselessly by events." 

 

"But all the events are sweeping in one direction." 

 

"They always do. Back! You�ll see!" 

 

"Sweeping to what, to dependence on the West instead of the East, 

like Fana said?" 

 

"Dependence is inevitable-realignment, but not occupation�" 

 

"The hell it won�t be occupation! Occupation by money, materialism, 

their markets, their values. You don�t think we can hold out against them, do 

you? What�s social justice to a color-TV set? That battle�s lost before it�s 

fought. Where do we stand?" 

 

"Where we always stood. In an absolutely untenable position." 

 

"He�s right. Seriously, we are exactly where we always were. Nobody 

else is. We are. They have caught up with us, for a moment, for this moment, 


and so we can act. The untenable position is the center of power. Now. We can 

act now." 

 

"To prevent color-TVzation? How? The dam�s broken! The goodies 

come flooding in. And we drown in them." 

 

"Not if we establish the direction, the true direction, right now�" 

 

"But will Rege listen to us? Why are. we turning back when we should 

be going forward? If we�" 

 

"We have to establish�" 

 

"No! We have to act! Freedom can be established only in the moment 

of freedom�" 

They were all shouting at once in their hoarse, worn-out voices. They 

had all been talking and listening and drinking bad coffee and living for days, 

for weeks, on love. Yes, on love; these are lovers� quarrels. It is for love that 

he pleads, it is for love that she rages. It was always for love. That�s why the 

camera snout came poking and sucking into this dirty basement room where 

the lovers meet. It craves love, the sight of love; for if you can�t have the real 

thing, you can watch it on TV, and soon you don�t know the real thing from the 

images on the little screen where everything, as he said, can be done in two 

seconds. But the lovers know the difference. 

 

 

This is a fairy tale, and you know that in the fairy tale, after it says 

that they lived happily ever after, there is no after. The evil enchantment was 

broken; the good servant received half the kingdom as his reward; the king 

ruled long and well. Remember the moment when the betrayal is made, and 

ask no questions. Do not ask if the poisoned fields grew white again with 

grain. Do not ask if the leaves of the forests grew green that spring. Do not 

ask what the maiden received as her reward. Remember the tale of Koshchey 

the Deathless, whose life was in a needle, and the needle was in an egg, and 

the egg was in a swan, and the swan was in an eagle, and the eagle was in a 

wolf, and the wolf was in the palace whose walls were built of the stones of 

power. Enchantment within enchantment! We are a long way from the egg 

that holds the needle that must be broken so Koshchey the Deathless can die. 

And so the tale ends. Thousands and thousands of people stood on the 

slanting pavement before the palace. Snow sparkled in the air, and the people 

sang. You know the song, that old song with words like land, love, free, in the 

language you have known the longest. Its words make stone part from stone, 

its words prevent tanks, its words transform the world, when it is sung at the 

right time by the right people, after enough people have died for singing it. 

A thousand doors opened in the walls of the palace. The soldiers laid 

down then- arms and sang. The evil enchantment was broken. The good king 

returned to his kingdom, and the people danced for joy on the stones of the 

city streets. 

 

 

And we do not ask what happened after. But we can tell the story 

over, we can tell the story till we get it right. 

 

"My daughter�s on the Committee of the Student Action Council," said 

Stefan Fabbre to his neighbor Florens Aske as they stood in a line outside the 

bakery on Pradinestrade. His tone of voice was complicated. 

I know. Erreskar saw her on the television," Aske said. 


 

"She says they�ve decided that bringing Rege here is the only way to 

provide an immediate, credible transition. They think the army will accept 

him." 

 

They shuffled forward a step. 

 

Aske, an old man with a hard brown face and narrow eyes, stuck his 

lips out, thinking it over. 

 

"You were in the Rege government," Fabbre said. 

Aske nodded. "Minister of education for a week," he said, and gave a 

bark like a sea lion�owp!�a cough or a laugh. 

 

"Do you think he can pull it off ?" 

Aske pulled his grubby muffler closer round his neck and said, "Well, 

Rege is not stupid. But he�s old. What about that scientist, that physicist 

fellow?" 

 

"Rochoy. She says their idea is that Rege�s brought in first, for the 

transition, for the symbolism, the link to Fifty-six. And if he survives, Rochoy 

would be the one they�d run in an election." 

 

"The dream of the election. . . ." 

They shuffled forward again. They were now in front of the bakery 

window, only eight or ten people from the door. 

 

"Why do they put up the old man?" asked the old man. "These boys 

and girls , these young people. What the devil do they want us for again?" 

I don�t know," Fabbre said. "I keep thinking they know what they�re 

doing. She had me down there, ),on know, made me come to one of their 

meetings. She came to the lab�Come on, leave that I follow me! I did. No 

questions. She�s in charge. All of them, twenty-two, twenty-three, they�re in 

charge. In power. Seeking structure, order. but very definite: Violence is 

defeat, to them, violence is the loss of options. They�re absolutely certain and 

Completely ignorant. Like spring-like the lambs in spring. They have never 

done anything and they know exactly what to do " 

 

"Stefan," said his wife, Bruna, who had been standing at his elbow for 

several sentences, "you�re lecturing. Hello, dear. Hello, Florens, I just saw 

Margarita at the market, we were queuing for cabbages. I�m on my way 

downtown. Stefan. I�ll be back, I don�t know, sometime after seven, maybe." 

 

"Again?" he said. 

 

And Aske said, "Downtown? 

 

"It�s Thursday," Bruna said. and bringing up the keys from her 

handbag, the two apartment keys and the desk key, she shook them in the air 

before the men�s faces, making a silvery jingle and she smiled. 

 

"I�ll come," said Stefan Fabbre. 

 

"Owp! Owp!" went Aske. "Oh, hell, I�ll come too. Does man live by 

bread alone?" 

 

"Will Margarita worry where you are?" Bruna asked as they left the 


bakery line and set off toward the bus stop. 

 

"That�s the problem with the women, you see, said the old man. "They 

worry that she�ll worry. Yes. She will. Ad you worry about your daughter, eh?" 

 

"Yes," Stefan said, "I do." 

 

"No," Bruna said, "I don�t. I fear her, I fear for her, I honor her. She 

gave me the keys." She clutched her imitation-leather handbag tight between 

her arm and side as they walked. 

 

 

This is the truth. They stood on the stones in the lightly falling snow 

and listened to the silvery, trembling sound of thousands of keys being 

shaken, unlocking the air, once upon a time. 

 

 ***