The Other Wind (25 page)

“Sister,” Tehanu said. “These are not the men who stole from us. They are those who pay the price.”

A silence followed her harsh, whispering voice.

“What was the price?” said the Namer.

Tehanu looked at Irian. Irian hesitated, and then said in a much subdued voice, “
Greed puts out the sun.
These are Kalessin’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 freedom, 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 unwillingly. “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 ancient 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 for. It is death. To be one with the earth again. To rejoin it.”

They all looked at him, but he hardly knew it; his awareness was half with them, half in the dry land. The grass beneath 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 her. “They built it, but they cannot unbuild it,” he said. “Will you help me, Tehanu?”

“I will, Hara,” she said.

A shadow 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.

***

T
HEY 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 answered, “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 answer.

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.

A
LDER 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 crossed the sky, a quick, slow-fading trail of light.

***

F
IVE 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 Paln 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 forever . . . 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 Azver.

“And who will come in the doors?” asked the Doorkeeper in his mild voice.

There was a pause. A cricket trilled industriously somewhere across the glade, fell silent, trilled again.

“Dragons?” said Azver.

The Doorkeeper shook his head. “I think maybe the division 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 Azver.

The cricket was answered by another, closer to the stream. The two trills 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 Azver.

“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 starlit 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.”

***

O
N 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.

***

A
LDER WOKE
. H
E LAY ON
earth and felt its depth beneath him. Above him the bright stars burned, the stars of summer, 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, Hara?” 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 gathered 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 little more than waist-high here. He put his hands on one of the stones of the coping row and tried to move it. It was fixed 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.