Tales From Earthsea (37 page)

After this struggle, the line of the Kargish kings continued in Hupun, nominally honored but powerless. The Four Lands were governed from Awabath. The high priests of the Twin Gods became Priestkings.

In the year 840 of the Archipelagan count, one of the two Priestkings poisoned the other and declared himself to be the incarnation of the Sky Father, the Godking, to be worshiped in the flesh. Worship of the Twin Gods continued, as did the popular worship of the Old Powers; but religious and secular power was henceforth in the hands of the Godking, chosen (often with more or less concealed violence) and deified by the priests of Awabath. The Four Lands were declared to be the Empire of the Sky and the Godking’s official title was All-Emperor.

The last heirs of the House of Hupun were a boy and girl, Ensar and Anthil. Wishing to end the line of the Kargish kings but unwilling to risk sacrilege by shedding royal blood, the Godking ordered these children to be stranded on a desert island. Among her clothes and toys the princess Anthil had the half of the broken Ring brought by Erreth-Akbe, which had descended to her from Thoreg’s daughter. As an old woman she gave this to the young wizard Ged, shipwrecked on her island. Later, with the help of the high priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, Arha-Tenar, Ged was able to rejoin the broken halves of the Ring and so remake the Rune of Peace. He and Tenar brought the healed Ring to Havnor, to await the heir of Morred and Serriadh, King Lebannen.

M
AGIC

Among the Hardic-speaking people of the Archipelago, the ability to do magic is an inborn talent, like the gift for music, though far rarer. Most people lack it entirely. In a few people, perhaps one in a hundred, it is a latent, cultivable talent. In a very few people it is manifest without training.

The gift for magic is empowered mainly by the use of the True Speech, the Language of the Making, in which the name of a thing is the thing.

This speech, innate to dragons, can be learned by human beings. Some few people are born with an untaught knowledge of at least some words of the Language of the Making. The teaching of it is the heart of the teaching of magic.

The true name of a person is a word in the True Speech. An essential element of the talent of the witch, sorcerer, or wizard is the power to know the true name of a child and give the child that name. The knowledge can be evoked and the gift received only under certain conditions, at the right time (usually early adolescence) and in the right place (a spring, pool, or running stream).

Since the name of the person is the person, in the most literal and absolute sense, anyone who knows it has real power, power of life and death, over the person. Often a true name is never known to anybody but the giver and to the owner, who both keep it secret all their life. The power to give the true name and the imperative to keep it secret are one. True names have been betrayed, but never by the name giver.

Some people of great innate and trained power are able to find out the true name of another, or even to have it come to them unsought. Since such knowledge can be betrayed or misused, it is immensely dangerous. Ordinary people—and dragons—keep their true name secret; wizards hide and defend theirs with spells. Morred could not even begin to fight his Enemy until he saw his Enemy’s name written in the dust by the falling rain. Ged could force the dragon Yevaud to obey him, having by both wizardry and scholarship discovered Yevaud’s true name under centuries of false ones.

Magic was a wild talent before the time of Morred, who as both king and mage established intellectual and moral discipline for the art magic, gathering wizards to work together at the court for the general good and to study the ethical bases and constraints of their practice. This harmony generally prevailed through the reign of Maharion. In the Dark Time, with no control over wizardly powers and widespread misuse of them, magic came into general disrepute.

THE SCHOOL ON ROKE

The school was founded in about 650, as described above. The Nine Masters or master-teachers of Roke were originally:

Windkey, master of the spells controlling weather
Hand, master of all illusions
Herbal, master of the arts of healing
Changer, master of the spells that transform matter and bodies
Summoner, master of the spells that call the spirits of the living and the dead
Namer, master of the knowledge of the True Speech
Patterner, dweller in the Immanent Grove, master of meaning and intent
Finder, master of the spells of finding, binding, and returning
Doorkeeper, master of the entering and leaving of the Great House

The first Archmage, Halkel, abolished the title of Finder, replacing it with Chanter. The Chanter’s task is the preservation and teaching of all the oral deeds, lays, songs, etc., and the sung spells.

The original loose, roughly descriptive use of the words
witch, sorcerer, wizard,
was codified into a strict hierarchy by Halkel. Under his rules:

Witchery
was restricted to women. All magic practiced by women was called “base craft,” even when it included practices otherwise called “high arts,” such as healing, chanting, changing, etc. Witches were to learn only from one another or from sorcerers. They were forbidden to enter Roke School, and Halkel discouraged wizards from teaching women anything at all. He specifically forbade the teaching of any word of the True Speech to women, and though this proscription was widely ignored, it led in the long run to a profound, long-lasting loss of knowledge and power among the women who practiced magic.

Sorcery
was practiced by men—its only real distinction from witchery. Sorcerers trained one another, and had some knowledge of the True Speech. Sorcery included both base crafts as defined by Halkel (finding, mending, dowsing, animal healing, etc.) and some high arts (human healing, chanting, weatherworking). A student who showed a gift for sorcery and was sent to Roke for training would first study the high arts of sorcery, and if successful in them might pursue his training in the art magic, especially in naming, summoning, and patterning, and so become a wizard.

A
wizard,
as Halkel defined the term, was a man who received his staff from a teacher, himself a wizard, who had taken special responsibility for his training. It was usually the Archmage who gave a student his staff and made him wizard. This kind of teaching and succession occurred elsewhere than Roke—notably on Paln—but the Masters of Roke came to regard with suspicion a student of anyone not trained on Roke.

Mage
remained an essentially undefined term: a wizard of great power.

The name and office of
archmage
were invented by Halkel, and the Archmage of Roke was a tenth Master, never counted among the Nine. A vital ethical and intellectual force, the archmage also exerted considerable political power. On the whole this power was used benevolently. Maintaining Roke as a strong centralising, normalising, pacific element in Archipelagan society, the archmages sent out sorcerers and wizards trained to understand the ethical practice of magic and to protect communities from drought, plague, invaders, dragons, and the unscrupulous use of their art.

Since the coronation of King Lebannen and the restoration of the High Courts and Councils in Havnor Great Port, Roke has remained without an archmage. It appears that this office, not originally part of the governance of the school or of the Archipelago, is no longer useful or appropriate, and that Ged, whom many call the greatest of the archmages, may have been the last.

CELIBACY AND WIZARDRY

Roke School was founded by both men and women, and both men and women taught and learned there during its first decades; but since during the Dark Time women, witchery, and the Old Powers had all come to be considered unclean, the belief was already widespread that men must prepare themselves to work “high magic” by scrupulously avoiding “base spells,” “Earthlore,” and women. A man unwilling to put himself under the iron control of a spell of chastity could never practice the high arts. He could be no more than a common sorcerer. Male wizards thus had come to avoid women, refusing to teach them or learn from them. Witches, who almost universally went on working magic without giving up their sexuality, were described by celibate men as temptresses, unclean, defiling, essentially wicked.

When in 730 the first Archmage of Roke, Halkel of Way, excluded women from the school, among his Nine Masters only the Patterner and the Doorkeeper protested; they were overruled. For more than three centuries, no woman taught or studied at the school on Roke. During those centuries, wizardry was an honored art, conferring status and power, while witchery was an unclean and ignorant superstition, practiced by women, paid for by peasants.

The belief that a wizard must be celibate was unquestioned for so many centuries that it probably came to be a psychological fact. Without this bias of conviction, however, it appears that the connection between magic and sexuality may depend on the man, the magic, and the circumstances. There is no doubt that so great a mage as Morred was a husband and father.

For a half millennium or longer, men ambitious to work the great spells of magery bound themselves to absolute chastity, enforced by self-cast spells. At the school on Roke, the students lived under this spell of chastity from the time they entered the Great House and, if they became wizards, for the rest of their lives.

Among sorcerers, few are strictly celibate, and many marry and bring up a family.

Women who work magic may practice periods of celibacy as well as fasting and other disciplines believed to purify and concentrate power; but most witches lead active sexual lives, having more freedom than most village women and less need to fear abuse. Many pledge “witch-troth” with another witch or an ordinary woman. They do not often marry men, and if they do, they are likely to choose a sorcerer.

I
T WOULD HAVE SIMPLIFIED THINGS
for my publishers and me if the fifth book of Earthsea had been a novel, but it wasn’t. Sometimes the elements of a book won’t come together into a single story, being by nature disparate. They have to go different places, different ways—one back through the centuries, another to Havnor, maybe, another to Semel . . . I couldn’t write the last Earthsea novel until I’d been to islands and times that I hadn’t yet explored. Storytellers’ stories, like scientific theories, are explorations, excursions into the tremendous gap between almost knowing and knowing. Bridges thrown out, as a spider throws herself on her first long anchoring thread, not certain where it will land her yet trusting it to do so.

I love no music better than the uncertain beginning of the last movement of Beethoven’s last symphony, when he starts a theme and drops it, repeats a phrase and breaks off, leaves gaps, gropes, explores, till he bursts out with his frustration in words—“Oh, friends, this isn’t right yet!”
¹
And then it all begins to come together, and the bridge has crossed the void.

I wrote an introduction for
Tales from Earthsea
when it was published in 2001, which began this way:

At the end of the fourth book of Earthsea,
Tehanu,
the story had arrived at what I felt to be
now.
And, just as in the now of the so-called real world, I didn’t know what would happen next. I could guess, foretell, fear, hope, but I didn’t know.

Unable to continue Tehanu’s story (because it hadn’t happened yet) and foolishly assuming that the story of Ged and Tenar had reached its happily-ever-after, I gave the book a subtitle: “The Last Book of Earthsea.”

O foolish writer.
Now
moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a time,
now
isn’t
then.

Seven or eight years after
Tehanu
was published, I was asked to write a story set in Earthsea. A mere glimpse at the place told me that things had been happening there while I wasn’t looking. It was high time to go back and find out what was going on
now.

For the whole story of Earthsea to have weight and make sense in my own mind so that I could take it to its end, so that I could build the bridge to true closure, not only did I have to find out what was going on now, but I had to go back in time to find out what had gone wrong, and when, and how. Why had the wise teaching of the Balance been getting increasingly out of balance?

People who live immersed in the ceaseless present tense of electronic media may have no interest in the past, letting mythology replace history, as pre-literate peoples did. But as I grew up with the un-rearrangeable, implacable durability of print, my education gave me the sense of the past that perceives the present as only the bright restless surface of an ocean. So, paradoxical as it may seem, I didn’t want a mythology of my mythical world, but the history of it—the facts of the fiction, its time depths. Which of course meant, yet more paradoxically, that I had to make it up. To grope, blunder, see if it worked. Oh, friends, this isn’t right yet!

The “Description of Earthsea” at the end of the
Tales
is a summary sketch of that history as I worked it out while writing the stories.

The first novella, “The Finder,” is the “prequel,” the story behind the story of the first four books of Earthsea. Writing it really was like swinging out on a spider thread into the unknown. I had no clear idea where young Otter was going when he set out into his dark, misgoverned world. I knew only that he would come to Roke, and find, or found, the School there. By following him, I hoped to learn, for one thing, how it came to be that the wizards of Roke, as I first knew them, had renounced their sexuality and how much of their humanity they had renounced with it.

All the stories are explorations of such matters—unclarities, balances and imbalances, moral choices. “Darkrose and Diamond” again has to do with the question of wizardly celibacy, and also asks the question: If you could either do magic or make songs but not both, which might you choose, and why? In “The Bones of the Earth” I found out who Ogion was, who his teacher was, and how far magic could and could not go. “On the High Marsh” let me deal with what gets left out when magic is understood purely as power. Power over whom, and to do what? Save the world from your enemies? Is that all? Is it enough? If power is responsibility, for whom are you responsible? In this story (as in T .H. White’s
Sword in the Stone
and many other fantasies) the presence of animals disallows wholly human-centered conventions, hinting at a different, larger order of things.