Tales From Earthsea (3 page)

He had been stowed in a storeroom of one of the old palaces that Losen had appropriated. It had no window, its door was cross-grained oak barred with iron, and spells had been laid on that door that would have kept a far more experienced wizard captive. There were men of great skill and power in Losen’s pay.

Hound did not consider himself to be one of them. “All I have is a nose,” he said. He came daily to see that Otter was recovering from his concussion and dislocated shoulder, and to talk with him. He was, as far as Otter could see, well-meaning and honest. “If you won’t work for us they’ll kill you,” he said. “Losen can’t have fellows like you on the loose. You’d better hire on while he’ll take you.”

“I can’t.”

Otter stated it as an unfortunate fact, not as a moral assertion. Hound looked at him with appreciation. Living with the pirate king, he was sick of boasts and threats, of boasters and threateners.

“What are you strongest in?”

Otter was reluctant to answer. He had to like Hound, but didn’t have to trust him. “Shape-changing,” he mumbled at last.

“Shape-taking?”

“No. Just tricks. Turn a leaf to a gold piece. Seemingly.”

In those days they had no fixed names for the various kinds and arts of magic, nor were the connections among those arts clear. There was—as the wise men of Roke would say later—no science in what they knew. But Hound knew pretty surely that his prisoner was concealing his talents.

“Can’t change your own form, even seemingly?”

Otter shrugged.

It was hard for him to lie. He thought he was awkward at it because he had no practice. Hound knew better. He knew that magic itself resists untruth. Conjuring, sleight of hand, and false commerce with the dead are counterfeits of magic, glass to the diamond, brass to the gold. They are fraud, and lies flourish in that soil. But the art of magic, though it may be used for false ends, deals with what is real, and the words it works with are the true words. So true wizards find it hard to lie about their art. In their heart they know that their lie, spoken, may change the world.

Hound was sorry for him. “You know, if it was Gelluk questioning you, he’d have everything you know out of you just with a word or two, and your wits with it. I’ve seen what old Whiteface leaves behind when he asks questions. Listen, can you work with the wind at all?”

Otter hesitated and said, “Yes.”

“D’you have a bag?”

Weatherworkers used to carry a leather sack in which they said they kept the winds, untying it to let a fair wind loose or to capture a contrary one. Maybe it was only for show, but every weatherworker had a bag, a great long sack or a little pouch.

“At home,” Otter said. It wasn’t a lie. He did have a pouch at home. He kept his fine-work tools and his bubble level in it. And he wasn’t altogether lying about the wind. Several times he had managed to bring a bit of magewind into the sail of a boat, though he had no idea how to combat or control a storm, as a ship’s weatherworker must do. But he thought he’d rather drown in a gale than be murdered in this hole.

“But you wouldn’t be willing to use that skill in the King’s service?”

“There is no king in Earthsea,” the young man said, stern and righteous.

“In my master’s service, then,” Hound amended, patient.

“No,” Otter said, and hesitated. He felt he owed this man an explanation. “See, it’s not so much won’t as can’t. I thought of making plugs in the planking of that galley, near the keel—you know what I mean by plugs? They’d work out as the timbers work when she gets in a heavy sea.” Hound nodded. “But I couldn’t do it. I’m a shipbuilder. I can’t build a ship to sink. With the men aboard her. My hands wouldn’t do it. So I did what I could. I made her go her own way. Not his way.”

Hound smiled. “They haven’t undone what you did yet, either,” he said. “Old Whiteface was crawling all over her yesterday, growling and muttering. Ordered the helm replaced.” He meant Losen’s chief mage, a pale man from the North named Gelluk, who was much feared in Havnor.

“That won’t do it.”

“Could you undo the spell you put on her?”

A flicker of complacency showed in Otter’s tired, battered young face. “No,” he said. “I don’t think anybody can.”

“Too bad. You might have used that to bargain with.”

Otter said nothing.

“A nose, now, is a useful thing, a salable thing,” Hound went on. “Not that I’m looking for competition. But a finder can always find work, as they say . . . You ever been in a mine?”

The guesswork of a wizard is close to knowledge, though he may not know what it is he knows. The first sign of Otter’s gift, when he was two or three years old, was his ability to go straight to anything lost, a dropped nail, a mislaid tool, as soon as he understood the word for it. And as a boy one of his dearest pleasures had been to go alone out into the countryside and wander along the lanes or over the hills, feeling through the soles of his bare feet and throughout his body the veins of water underground, the lodes and knots of ore, the lay and interfolding of the kinds of rock and earth. It was as if he walked in a great building, seeing its passages and rooms, the descents to airy caverns, the glimmer of branched silver in the walls; and as he went on, it was as if his body became the body of earth, and he knew its arteries and organs and muscles as his own. This power had been a delight to him as a boy. He had never sought any use for it. It had been his secret.

He did not answer Hound’s question.

“What’s below us?” Hound pointed to the floor, paved with rough slate flags.

Otter was silent a while. Then he said in a low voice, “Clay, and gravel, and under that the rock that bears garnets. All under this part of the city is that rock. I don’t know the names.”

“You can learn ’em.”

“I know how to build boats, how to sail boats.”

“You’ll do better away from the ships, all the fighting and raiding. The King’s working the old mines at Samory, round the mountain. There you’d be out of his way. Work for him you must, if you want to stay alive. I’ll see that you’re sent there. If you’ll go.”

After a little silence Otter said, “Thanks.” And he looked up at Hound, one brief, questioning, judging glance.

Hound had taken him, had stood and seen his people beaten senseless, had not stopped the beating. Yet he spoke as a friend. Why? said Otter’s look. Hound answered it.

“Crafty men need to stick together,” he said. “Men who have no art at all, nothing but wealth—they pit us one against the other, for their gain not ours. We sell ’em our power. Why do we? If we went our own way together, we’d do better, maybe.”

***

H
OUND MEANT WELL IN SENDING
the young man to Samory, but he did not understand the quality of Otter’s will. Nor did Otter himself. He was too used to obeying others to see that in fact he had always followed his own bent, and too young to believe that anything he did could kill him.

He planned, as soon as they took him out of his cell, to use the old Changer’s spell of self-transformation and so escape. Surely his life was in danger, and it would be all right to use the spell? Only he couldn’t decide what to turn himself into—a bird, or a wisp of smoke, what would be safest? But while he was thinking about it, Losen’s men, used to wizard’s tricks, drugged his food and he ceased to think of anything at all. They dumped him into a mule-cart like a sack of oats. When he showed signs of reviving during the journey, one of them bashed him on the head, remarking that he wanted to make sure he got his rest.

When he came to himself, sick and weak from the poison and with an aching skull, he was in a room with brick walls and bricked-up windows. The door had no bars and no visible lock. But when he tried to get to his feet he felt bonds of sorcery holding his body and mind, resilient, clinging, tightening as he moved. He could stand, but could not take a step towards the door. He could not even reach his hand out. It was a horrible sensation, as if his muscles were not his own. He sat down again and tried to hold still. The spellbonds around his chest kept him from breathing deeply, and his mind felt stifled too, as if his thoughts were crowded into a space too small for them.

After a long time the door opened and several men came in. He could do nothing against them as they gagged him and bound his arms behind him. “Now you won’t weave charms nor speak spells, young ’un,” said a broad, strong man with a furrowed face, “but you can nod your head well enough, right? They sent you here as a dowser. If you’re a good dowser you’ll feed well and sleep easy. Cinnabar, that’s what you’re to nod for. The King’s wizard says it’s still here somewhere about these old mines. And he wants it. So it’s best for us that we find it. Now I’ll walk you out. It’s like I’m the water finder and you’re my wand, see? You lead on. And if you want to go this way or that way you dip your head, so. And when you know there’s ore underfoot, you stamp on the place, so. Now that’s the bargain, right? And if you play fair I will.”

He waited for Otter to nod, but Otter stood motionless. “Sulk away,” the man said. “If you don’t like this work, there’s always the roaster.”

The man, whom the others called Licky, led him out into a hot, bright morning that dazzled his eyes. Leaving his cell he had felt the spellbonds loosen and fall away, but there were other spells woven about other buildings of the place, especially around a tall stone tower, filling the air with sticky lines of resistance and repulsion. If he tried to push forward into them his face and belly stung with jabs of agony, so that he looked at his body in horror for the wound; but there was no wound. Gagged and bound, without his voice and hands to work magic, he could do nothing against these spells. Licky had tied one end of a braided leather cord around his neck and held the other end, following him. He let Otter walk into a couple of the spells, and after that Otter avoided them. Where they were was plain enough: the dusty pathways bent to miss them.

Leashed like a dog, he walked along, sullen and shivering with sickness and rage. He stared around him, seeing the stone tower, stacks of wood by its wide doorway, rusty wheels and machines by a pit, great heaps of gravel and clay. Turning his sore head made him dizzy.

“If you’re a dowser, better dowse,” said Licky, coming up alongside him and looking sidelong into his face. “And if you’re not, you’d better dowse all the same. That way you’ll stay above ground longer.”

A man came out of the stone tower. He passed them, walking hurriedly with a queer shambling gait, staring straight ahead. His chin shone and his chest was wet with spittle leaking from his lips.

“That’s the roaster tower,” said Licky. “Where they cook the cinnabar to get the metal from it. Roasters die in a year or two. Where to, dowser?”

After a bit Otter nodded left, away from the grey stone tower. They walked on towards a long, treeless valley, past grass-grown dumps and tailings.

“All under here’s worked out long since,” Licky said. And Otter had begun to be aware of the strange country under his feet: empty shafts and rooms of dark air in the dark earth, a vertical labyrinth, the deepest pits filled with unmoving water. “Never was much silver, and the watermetal’s long gone. Listen, young ’un, do you even know what cinnabar is?”

Otter shook his head.

“I’ll show you some. That’s what Gelluk’s after. The ore of watermetal. Watermetal eats all the other metals, even gold, see. So he calls it the King. If you find him his King, he’ll treat you well. He’s often here. Come on, I’ll show you. Dog can’t track till he’s had the scent.”

Licky took him down into the mines to show him the gangues, the kinds of earth the ore was likely to occur in. A few miners were working at the end of a long level.

Because they were smaller than men and could move more easily in narrow places, or because they were at home with the earth, or most likely because it was the custom, women had always worked the mines of Earthsea. These miners were free women, not slaves like the workers in the roaster tower. Gelluk had made him foreman over the miners, Licky said, but he did no work in the mine; the miners forbade it, earnestly believing it was the worst of bad luck for a man to pick up a shovel or shore a timber. “Suits me,” Licky said.

A shock-haired, bright-eyed woman with a candle bound to her forehead set down her pick to show Otter a little cinnabar in a bucket, brownish red clots and crumbs. Shadows leapt across the earth face at which the miners worked. Old timbers creaked, dirt sifted down. Though the air ran cool through the darkness, the drifts and levels were so low and narrow the miners had to stoop and squeeze their way. In places the ceilings had collapsed. Ladders were shaky. The mine was a terrifying place; yet Otter felt a sense of shelter in it. He was half sorry to go back up into the burning day.

Licky did not take him into the roaster tower, but back to the barracks. From a locked room he brought out a small, soft, thick, leather bag that weighed heavy in his hands. He opened it to show Otter the little pool of dusty brilliance lying in it. When he closed the bag the metal moved in it, bulging, pressing, like an animal trying to get free.

“There’s the King,” Licky said, in a tone that might have been reverence or hatred.

Though not a sorcerer, Licky was a much more formidable man than Hound. Yet like Hound he was brutal not cruel. He demanded obedience, but nothing else. Otter had seen slaves and their masters all his life in the shipyards of Havnor, and knew he was fortunate. At least in daylight, when Licky was his master.

He could eat only in the cell, where they took his gag off. Bread and onions were what they gave him, with a slop of rancid oil on the bread. Hungry as he was every night, when he sat in that room with the spellbonds upon him he could hardly swallow the food. It tasted of metal, of ash. The nights were long and terrible, for the spells pressed on him, weighed on him, waked him over and over terrified, gasping for breath, and never able to think coherently. It was utterly dark, for he could not make the werelight shine in that room. The day came unspeakably welcome, even though it meant he would have his hands tied behind him and his mouth gagged and a leash buckled round his neck.