Tales From Earthsea (18 page)

“Father, I don’t want a party,” Diamond said and stood up, shivering his muscles like a horse. He was bigger than Golden now, and when he moved abruptly it was startling. “I’ll go to Easthill,” he said, and left the room.

“What’s that all about?” Golden said to his wife, a rhetorical question. She looked at him and said nothing, a non-rhetorical answer.

After Golden had gone out, she found her son in the counting room going through ledgers. She looked at the pages. Long, long lists of names and numbers, debts and credits, profits and losses.

“Di,” she said, and he looked up. His face was still round and a bit peachy, though the bones were heavier and the eyes were melancholy.

“I didn’t mean to hurt Father’s feelings,” he said.

“If he wants a party, he’ll have it,” she said. Their voices were alike, being in the higher register but dark-toned, and held to an even quietness, contained, restrained. She perched on a stool beside his at the high desk.

“I can’t,” he said, and stopped, and went on, “I really don’t want to have any dancing.”

“He’s matchmaking,” Tuly said, dry, fond.

“I don’t care about that.”

“I know you don’t.”

“The problem is . . .”

“The problem is the music,” his mother said at last.

He nodded.

“My son, there is no reason,” she said, suddenly passionate, “there is
no
reason why you should give up everything you love!”

He took her hand and kissed it as they sat side by side.

“Things don’t mix,” he said. “They ought to, but they don’t. I found that out. When I left the wizard. I thought I could be everything. You know—do magic, play music, be Father’s son, love Rose . . . It doesn’t work that way. Things don’t mix.”

“They do, they do,” Tuly said. “Everything is hooked together, tangled up!”

“Maybe things are, for women. But I . . . I can’t be double-hearted.”

“Double-hearted? You? You gave up wizardry because you knew that if you didn’t, you’d betray it.”

He took the word with a visible shock, but did not deny it.

“But why,” she demanded, “why did you give up music?”

“I have to have a single heart. I can’t play the harp while I’m bargaining with a mule breeder. I can’t make ballads while I’m figuring what we have to pay the pickers to keep ’em from hiring out to Lowbough!” His voice shook a little now, a vibrato, and his eyes were not sad, but angry.

“So you put a spell on yourself,” she said, “just as that wizard put one on you. A spell to keep you safe. To keep you with the mule breeders, and the nut pickers, and these.” She struck the ledger full of lists of names and figures, a flicking, dismissive tap. “A spell of silence,” she said.

After a long time the young man said, “What else can I do?”

“I don’t know, my dear. I do want you to be safe. I do love to see your father happy and proud of you. But I can’t bear to see you unhappy, without pride! I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Maybe for a man it’s only one thing ever. But I miss hearing you sing.”

She was in tears. They hugged, and she stroked his thick, shining hair and apologised for being cruel, and he hugged her again and said she was the kindest mother in the world, and so she went off. But as she left she turned back a moment and said, “Let him have the party, Di. Let yourself have it.”

“I will,” he said, to comfort her.

***

G
OLDEN ORDERED THE BEER AND
food and fireworks, but Diamond saw to hiring the musicians.

“Of course I’ll bring my band,” Tarry said, “fat chance I’d miss it! You’ll have every tootler in the west of the world here for one of your dad’s parties.”

“You can tell ’em you’re the band that’s getting paid.”

“Oh, they’ll come for the glory,” said the harper, a lean, long-jawed, walleyed fellow of forty. “Maybe you’ll have a go with us yourself, then? You had a hand for it, before you took to making money. And the voice not bad, if you’d worked on it.”

“I doubt it,” Diamond said.

“That girl you liked, witch’s Rose, she’s running about with Labby, I hear. No doubt they’ll come by.”

“I’ll see you then,” said Diamond, looking big and handsome and indifferent, and walked off.

“Too high and mighty these days to stop and talk,” said Tarry, “though I taught him all he knows of harping. But what’s that to a rich man?”

***

T
ARRY’S MALICE HAD LEFT
D
IAMOND’S
nerves raw, and the thought of the party weighed on him till he lost his appetite. He thought hopefully for a while that he was sick and could miss the party. But the day came, and he was there. Not so evidently, so eminently, so flamboyantly there as his father, but present, smiling, dancing. All his childhood friends were there too, half of them married by now to the other half, it seemed, but there was still plenty of flirting going on, and several pretty girls were always near him. He drank a good deal of Gadge Brewer’s excellent beer, and found he could endure the music if he was dancing to it and talking and laughing while he danced. So he danced with all the pretty girls in turn, and then again with whichever one turned up again, which all of them did.

It was Golden’s grandest party yet, with a dancing floor built on the town green down the way from Golden’s house, and a tent for the old folks to eat and drink and gossip in, and new clothes for the children, and jugglers and puppeteers, some of them hired and some of them coming by to pick up whatever they could in the way of coppers and free beer. Any festivity drew itinerant entertainers and musicians; it was their living, and though uninvited they were welcomed. A tale singer with a droning voice and a droning bagpipe was singing
The Deed of the Dragonlord
to a group of people under the big oak on the hilltop. When Tarry’s band of harp, fife, viol, and drum took time off for a breather and a swig, a new group hopped up onto the dance floor. “Hey, there’s Labby’s band!” cried the pretty girl nearest Diamond. “Come on, they’re the best!”

Labby, a light-skinned, flashy-looking fellow, played the double-reed woodhorn. With him were a violist, a tabor player, and Rose, who played fife. Their first tune was a stampy, fast and brilliant, too fast for some of the dancers. Diamond and his partner stayed in, and people cheered and clapped them when they finished the dance, sweating and panting. “Beer!” Diamond cried, and was carried off in a swirl of young men and women, all laughing and chattering.

He heard behind him the next tune start up, the viol alone, strong and sad as a tenor voice: “Where My Love Is Going.”

He drank a mug of beer down in one draft, and the girls with him watched the muscles in his strong throat as he swallowed, and they laughed and chattered, and he shivered all over like a cart horse stung by flies. He said, “Oh! I can’t—!” He bolted off into the dusk beyond the lanterns hanging around the brewer’s booth. “Where’s he going?” said one, and another, “He’ll be back,” and they laughed and chattered.

The tune ended. “Darkrose,” he said, behind her in the dark. She turned her head and looked at him. Their heads were on a level, she sitting cross-legged up on the dance platform, he kneeling on the grass.

“Come to the sallows,” he said.

She said nothing. Labby, glancing at her, set his woodhorn to his lips. The drummer struck a triple beat on his tabor, and they were off into a sailor’s jig.

When she looked around again Diamond was gone.

Tarry came back with his band in an hour or so, ungrateful for the respite and much the worse for beer. He interrupted the tune and the dancing, telling Labby loudly to clear out.

“Ah, pick your nose, harp picker,” Labby said, and Tarry took offense, and people took sides, and while the dispute was at its brief height, Rose put her fife in her pocket and slipped away.

Away from the lanterns of the party it was dark, but she knew the way in the dark. He was there. The willows had grown, these two years. There was only a little space to sit among the green shoots and the long, falling leaves.

The music started up, distant, blurred by wind and the murmur of the river running.

“What did you want, Diamond?”

“To talk.”

They were only voices and shadows to each other.

“So,” she said.

“I wanted to ask you to go away with me,” he said.

“When?”

“Then. When we quarreled. I said it all wrong. I thought . . .” A long pause. “I thought I could go on running away. With you. And play music. Make a living. Together. I meant to say that.”

“You didn’t say it.”

“I know. I said everything wrong. I did everything wrong. I betrayed everything. The magic. And the music. And you.”

“I’m all right,” she said.

“Are you?”

“I’m not really good on the fife, but I’m good enough. What you didn’t teach me, I can fill in with a spell, if I have to. And the band, they’re all right. Labby isn’t as bad as he looks. Nobody fools with me. We make a pretty good living. Winters, I go stay with Mother and help her out. So I’m all right. What about you, Di?”

“All wrong.”

She started to say something, and did not say it.

“I guess we were children,” he said. “Now . . .”

“What’s changed?”

“I made the wrong choice.”

“Once?” she said. “Or twice?”

“Twice.”

“Third time’s the charm.”

Neither spoke for a while. She could just make out the bulk of him in the leafy shadows. “You’re bigger than you were,” she said. “Can you still make a light, Di? I want to see you.”

He shook his head.

“That was the one thing you could do that I never could. And you never could teach me.”

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. “Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.”

“And the wizard in South Port didn’t teach you how to make it work?”

“He only taught me names.”

“Why can’t you do it now?”

“I gave it up, Darkrose. I had to either do it and nothing else, or not do it. You have to have a single heart.”

“I don’t see why,” she said. “My mother can cure a fever and ease a childbirth and find a lost ring, maybe that’s nothing compared to what the wizards and the dragonlords can do, but it’s not nothing, all the same. And she didn’t give up anything for it. Having me didn’t stop her. She had me so that she could
learn
how to do it! Just because I learned how to play music from you, did I have to give up saying spells? I can bring a fever down now too. Why should you have to stop doing one thing so you can do the other?”

“My father,” he began, and stopped, and gave a kind of laugh. “They don’t go together,” he said. “The money and the music.”

“The father and the witch-girl,” said Darkrose.

Again there was silence between them. The leaves of the willows stirred.

“Would you come back to me?” he said. “Would you go with me, live with me, marry me, Darkrose?”

“Not in your father’s house, Di.”

“Anywhere. Run away.”

“But you can’t have me without the music.”

“Or the music without you.”

“I would,” she said.

“Does Labby want a harper?”

She hesitated; she laughed. “If he wants a fife player,” she said.

“I haven’t practiced ever since I left, Darkrose,” he said. “But the music was always in my head, and you . . .” She reached out her hands to him. They knelt facing, the willow leaves moving across their hair. They kissed each other, timidly at first.

***

I
N THE YEARS AFTER
D
IAMOND
left home, Golden made more money than he had ever done before. All his deals were profitable. It was as if good fortune stuck to him and he could not shake it off. He grew immensely wealthy.

He did not forgive his son. It would have made a happy ending, but he would not have it. To leave so, without a word, on his nameday night, to go off with the witch-girl, leaving all the honest work undone, to be a vagrant musician, a harper twanging and singing and grinning for pennies—there was nothing but shame and pain and anger in it for Golden. So he had his tragedy.

Tuly shared it with him for a long time, since she could see her son only by lying to her husband, which she found hard to do. She wept to think of Diamond hungry, sleeping hard. Cold nights of autumn were a misery to her. But as time went on and she heard him spoken of as Diamond the sweet singer of the West of Havnor, Diamond who had harped and sung to the great lords in the Tower of the Sword, her heart grew lighter. And once, when Golden was down at South Port, she and Tangle took a donkey cart and drove over to Easthill, where they heard Diamond sing the
Lay of the Lost Queen,
while Rose sat with them, and Little Tuly sat on Tuly’s knee. And if not a happy ending, that was a true joy, which may be enough to ask for, after all.

I
T WAS RAINING AGAIN, AND
the wizard of Re Albi was sorely tempted to make a weather spell, just a little, small spell, to send the rain on round the mountain. His bones ached. They ached for the sun to come out and shine through his flesh and dry them out. Of course he could say a pain spell, but all that would do was hide the ache for a while. There was no cure for what ailed him. Old bones need the sun. The wizard stood still in the doorway of his house, between the dark room and the rain-streaked open air, preventing himself from making a spell, and angry at himself for preventing himself and for having to be prevented.