The Other Wind (15 page)

Tenar was in the crowd on the quay, and Tehanu went straight to her. They embraced fiercely. But as they walked up the street 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 tension and energy, he was regal, warlike, radiant. “Erreth-Akbe,” people 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 truce. 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-Akbe, 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 full 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 sacred 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 attention. “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.

***

T
HE 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 Heru and her son Maharion. The Havnorian Lay says:

A hundred warriors, a hundred women
sat in the great hall 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 hall for over a century Gemal’s heirs had built an ever larger palace, and lastly Heru 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 centuries 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 trading, 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 destroying their business and would leave their children destitute. 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. Nothing 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 Enlad 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 buttocks 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 counselors of state. There were merchants, shippers, and factors of Havnor and the other great port cities of the Sea of Éa 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 wizard, 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 Iffish 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 Éa 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 council 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 debates within the various divisions and special bodies of the council were often hotly contested, and even in full 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 attention 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 councillors 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 appearance 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 grateful to him, they respected his judgment.

The elderly Lady of Ebéa 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 Tenar of the Ring, by the onetime Archmage of Roke, and by the dragon Kalessin, on whose back the king himself had been borne from Selidor.

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 message 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. And 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 Felkway. “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 another 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-tripped 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 hot-blooded 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.”

A ship’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 Paln stood up. He was a short man with a soft voice. “To take the form is to be the being, captain,” 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 wind . . . 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, telling the sixth hour, noon. The king stood, and Prince Sege declared a recess until the first hour of the afternoon.