They were both silent, both thinking of the glades and aisles of that wood, the sunlight and starlight in its leaves.
“It is the heart of the world,” Alder said.
Sparrowhawk looked up eastward at the slopes of Gont Mountain, dark with trees. “I’ll go walking there,” he said, “in the forest, come autumn.”
After a while he said, “Tell me what counsel the Patterner had for you, and why he sent you here to me.”
“He said, my lord, that you knew more of the… the dry land than any living man, and so maybe you would understand what it means that the souls there come to me as they do, begging me for freedom.”
“Did he say how he thinks it came about?”
“Yes. He said that maybe my wife and I didn’t know how to be parted, only how to be joined. That it was not my doing, but was maybe ours together, because we drew each to the other, like drops of quicksilver. But the Master Sum-moner didn’t agree. He said that only a great power of magery could so transgress the order of the world. Because my old master Gannet also touched me across the wall, the Summoner said maybe it was a mage power in him which had been hidden or disguised in life, but now was revealed.”
Sparrowhawk brooded a while. “When I lived on Roke,” he said, “I might have seen it as the Summoner does. There I knew no power stronger than what we call magery. Not even the Old Powers of the Earth, I thought… If the Summoner you met is the man I think, he came as a boy to Roke. My old friend Vetch of Iffish sent him to study with us. And he never left. That’s a difference between him and Azver the Patterner. Azver lived till he was grown as a warrior’s son, a warrior himself, among men and women, in the thick of life. Matters that the walls of the School keep out, he knows in his flesh and blood. He knows that men and women love, make love, marry… Having lived these fifteen years outside the walls, I incline to think Azver might be on the better track. The bond between you and your wife is stronger than the division between life and death.”
Alder hesitated. “I’ve thought it might be so. But it seems… shameless to think it. We loved each other, more than I can say we loved each other, but was our love greater than any other before us? Was it greater than Morred’s and Elfarran’s?”
“Maybe not less.”
“How can that be?”
Sparrowhawk looked at him as if saluting something, and answered him with a care that made Alder feel honored. “Well,” he said slowly, “sometimes there’s a passion that comes in its springtime to ill fate or death. And because it ends in its beauty, it’s what the harpers sing of and the poets make stories of: the love that escapes the years. That was the love of the Young King and Elfarran. That was your love, Hara. It wasn’t greater than Morred’s, but was his greater than yours?”
Alder said nothing, pondering.
“There’s no less or greater in an absolute thing,” Sparrowhawk said. “All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that’s the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it’s life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?”
He spoke softly but with fire and energy, then he leaned back, and after a minute said, with a half smile, “Every oaf of a farm boy sings that, every young girl that dreams of love knows it. But it’s not a thing the Masters of Roke are familiar with. The Patterner maybe knew it early. I learned it late. Very late. Not quite too late.” He looked at Alder, the fire still in his eyes, challenging. “You had that,” he said.
“I did.” Alder drew a deep breath. Presently he said, “Maybe they’re there together, in the dark land. Morred and Elfarran.”
“No,” Sparrowhawk said with bleak certainty.
“But if the bond is true, what can break it?”
“There are no lovers there.”
“Then what are they, what do they do, there in that land? You’ve been there, you crossed the wall. You walked and spoke with them. Tell me!”
“I will.” But Sparrowhawk said nothing for a while. “I don’t like to think about it,” he said. He rubbed his head and scowled. “You saw…You’ve seen those stars. Little, mean stars, that never move. No moon. No sunrise… There are roads, if you go down the hill. Roads and cities. On the hill there’s grass, dead grass, but farther down there’s only dust and rocks. Nothing grows. Dark cities. The multitudes of the dead stand in the streets, or walk on the roads to no end. They don’t speak. They don’t touch. They never touch.” His voice was low and dry. “There Morred would pass Elfarran and never turn his head, and she wouldn’t look at him… There’s no rejoining there, Hara. No bond. The mother doesn’t hold her child, there.”
“But my wife came to me,” Alder said, “she called my name, she kissed my mouth!”
“Yes. And since your love wasn’t greater than any other mortal love, and since you and she aren’t mighty wizards whose power might change the laws of life and death, therefore, therefore something else is in this. Something is happening, is changing. Though it happens through you and to you, you are its instrument and not its cause.”
Sparrowhawk stood up and strode to the beginning of the path along the cliff and back to Alder; he was charged, almost quivering with tense energy, like a hawk about to stoop down on its prey.
“Did your wife not say to you, when you called her by her true name, That is not my name any more—?”
“Yes,” Alder whispered.
“But how is that? We who have true names keep them when we die, it’s our use-name that is forgotten… This is a mystery to the learned, I can tell you, but as well as we understand it, a true name is a word in the True Speech. That’s why only one with the gift can know a child’s name and give it. And the name binds the being—alive or dead. All the art of the Summoner lies in that… Yet when the master summoned your wife to come by her true name, she didn’t come to him. You called by her use-name, Lily, and she came to you. Did she come to you as to the one who knew her truly?”
He gazed at Alder keenly and yet as if he saw more than the man who sat with him. After a while he went on, “When my master Aihal died, my wife was here with him; and as he was dying he said to her, all is changed, all changed. He was looking across that wall. From which side I do not know.
“And since that time, indeed there have been changes—a king on Morred’s throne, and no Archmage of Roke. But more than that, much more. I saw a child summon the dragon Kalessin, the Eldest: and Kalessin came to her, calling her daughter, as I do. What does that mean? What does it mean that dragons have been seen above the islands of the west? The king sent to us, sent a ship to Gont Port, asking my daughter Tehanu to come and take counsel with him concerning dragons. People fear that the old covenant is broken, that the dragons will come to burn fields and cities as they did before Erreth-Akbe fought with Orm Embar. And now, at the boundary of life and death, a soul refuses the bond of her name… I do not understand it. All I know is that it is changing. It is all changing.”
There was no fear in his voice, only fierce exultation.
Alder could not share that. He had lost too much and was too worn out by his struggle against forces he could not control or comprehend. But his heart rose to that gallantry.
“May it change for the good, my lord,” he said.
“Be it so,” the old man said. “But change it must.”
As the heat went out of the day, Sparrowhawk said he had to walk to the village. He carried the basket of plums with a basket of eggs nested in it.
Alder walked with him and they talked. When Alder understood that Sparrowhawk bartered fruit and eggs and the other produce of the little farm for barley and wheat flour, that the wood he burned was gathered patiently up in the forest, that his goats’ not giving milk meant he must eke out last year’s cheese, Alder was amazed: how could it be that the Archmage of Earthsea lived from hand to mouth? Did his own people not honor him?
When he went with him to the village, he saw women shut their doors
when they saw the old man coming. The marketer who took his eggs and fruit tallied the count on his wooden tablet without a word, his face sullen and his eyes lowered. Sparrowhawk spoke to him pleasantly, “A good day to you then, Iddi,” but got no answer.
“My lord,” Alder asked as they walked home, “do they know who you are?”
“No,” said the ex-Archmage, with a dry sidelong look. “And yes.”
“But—” Alder did not know how to speak his indignation.
“They know I have no power of sorcery, but there’s something uncanny about me. They know I live with a foreigner, a Kargish woman. They know the girl we call our daughter is something like a witch, but worse, because her face and hand were burnt away by fire, and because she herself burnt up the Lord of Re Albi, or pushed him off the cliff, or killed him with the evil eye—their stories vary. They honor the house we live in, though, because it was Aihal’s and Heleth’s house, and dead wizards are good wizards… You’re a townsman, Alder, of an isle of Morred’s kingdom. A village on Gont is another matter.”
“But why do you stay here, lord? Surely the king would do you proper honor—”
“I want no honor,” the old man said, with a violence that silenced Alder entirely.
They walked on. As they came to the house built at the cliff’s edge he spoke again. “This is my eyrie,” he said.
They had a glass of the red wine with supper, and another sitting out to watch the sun set. They did not talk much. Fear of the night, of the dream, was coming into Alder.
“I’m no healer,” his host said, “but perhaps I can do what the Master Herbal did to let you sleep.”
Alder looked his question.
“I’ve been thinking about it, and it seems to me maybe it was no spell at all that kept you away from that hillside, but just the touch of a living hand. If you like, we can try it.”
Alder protested, but Sparrowhawk said, “I’m awake hah0 most nights anyway.” So the guest lay that night in the low bed in the back corner of the big room, and the host sat up beside him, watching the fire and dozing.
He watched Alder, too, and saw him fall asleep at last; and not long after that saw him start and shudder in his sleep. He put out his hand and laid it on Alder’s shoulder as he lay half turned away. The sleeping man stirred a little, sighed, relaxed, and slept on.
It pleased Sparrowhawk that he could do this much. As good as a wizard, he told himself with mild sarcasm.
He was not sleepy, the tension was still in him. He thought about all Alder had told him, and what they had talked about in the afternoon. He saw Alder stand in the path by the cabbage patch saying the spell to call the goats, and the goats’ haughty indifference to the powerless words. He remembered how he had used to speak the name of the Sparrowhawk, the marsh hawk, the grey eagle, calling them down from the sky to him in a rush of wings to grasp his arm with iron talons and glare at him, eye to wrathful, golden eye… None of that any more. He could boast, calling this house his eyrie, but he had no wings.
But Tehanu did. The dragon’s wings were hers to fly on.
The fire had burned out. He pulled his sheepskin over him more closely, leaning his head back against the wall, still keeping his hand on Alder’s inert, warm shoulder. He liked the man and was sorry for him.
He must remember to ask him to mend the green pitcher, tomorrow.
The grass next to the wall was short, dry, dead. No wind blew to make it move or rustle.
He roused up with a start, hah0 rising from the chair, and after a moment of bewilderment put his hand back on Alder’s shoulder, grasping it a little, and whispered, “Hara! Come away, Hara.” Alder shuddered, then relaxed. He sighed again, turned more onto his face and lay still.
Sparrowhawk sat with his hand on the sleeper’s arm. How had he himself come there, to the wall of stones? He no longer had the power to go there. He had no way to find the way. As in the night before, Alder’s dream or vision, Alder’s voyaging soul had drawn him with it to the edge of the dark land.
He was wide awake now. He sat gazing at the greyish square of the west window, full of stars.
The grass under the wall… It did not grow farther down where the hill leveled out into the dim, dry land. He had said to Alder that down there was only dust, only rock. He saw that black dust, black rock. Dead stream beds where no water ever ran. No living thing. No bird, no field mouse cowering, no glitter and buzz of little insects, the creatures of the sun. Only the dead, with their empty eyes and silent faces.
But did birds not die?
A mouse, a gnat, a goat—a white-and-brown, clever-hoofed, yellow-eyed, shameless goat, Sippy who had been Tehanu’s pet, and who had died last winter at a great age—where was Sippy? Not in the dry land, the dark land. She was dead, but she was not there. She was where she belonged, in the dirt. In the dirt, in the light, in the wind, the leap of water from the rock, the yellow eye of the sun.
Then why, then why…
He watched Alder mend the pitcher. Fat-bellied and jade green, it had been a favorite of Tenar’s; she had carried it all the way from Oak Farm, years ago. It had slipped from his hands the other day as he took it from the shelf. He had picked up the two big pieces of it and the little fragments with some notion of gluing them back together so it could sit out for looks, if never for use again. Every time he saw the pieces, which he had put into a basket, his clumsiness had outraged him.
Now, fascinated, he watched Alder’s hands. Slender, strong, deft, unhurried, they cradled the shape of the pitcher, stroking and fitting and settling the pieces of pottery, urging and caressing, the thumbs coaxing and guiding the smaller fragments into place, reuniting them, reassuring them. While he worked he murmured a two-word, tuneless chant. They were words of the Old Speech. Ged knew and did not know their meaning. Alder’s face was serene, all stress and sorrow gone: a face so wholly absorbed in time and task that timeless calm shone through it.
His hands separated from the pitcher, opening out from it like the sheath of a flower opening. It stood on the oak table, whole.
He looked at it with quiet pleasure.
When Ged thanked him, he said, “It was no trouble at all. The breaks were very clean. It’s a well-made piece, and good clay. It’s the shoddy work that costs to mend.”
“I had a thought how you might find sleep,” Ged said.
Alder had waked at first light and had got up, so that his host could go to his bed and sleep sound till broad day; but clearly the arrangement would not do for long.
“Come along with me,” the old man said, and they set off inland on a path that skirted the goats’ pasture and wound between knolls, little, half-tended fields, and inlets of the forest. Gont was a wild-looking place to Alder, ragged and random, the shaggy mountain always frowning and looming above.
“It seemed to me,” Sparrowhawk said as they walked, “if I could do as well as the Master Herbal did, keeping you from the hill of the wall only by putting my hand on you, that there might be others who could help you. If you have no objection to animals.”
“Animals?”
“You see,” Sparrowhawk began, but got no further, interrupted by a strange creature bounding down the path towards them. It was bundled in skirts and shawls, feathers stuck out in all directions from its head, and it wore high leather boots. “O Mastawk, O Mastawk!” it shouted.
“Hello, then, Heather. Gently now,” said Sparrowhawk. The woman stopped, rocking her body, her head-feathers waving, a large grin on her face. “She knowed you was a-coming!” she bawled. “She made that hawk’s beak with her fingers like this, see, she did, and she told me go, go, with her hand! She knowed you was a-coming!”
“And so I am.”
“To see us?”
“To see you. Heather, this is Master Alder.”
“Master Alder,” she whispered, quieting suddenly as she included Alder in her consciousness. She shrank, drew into herself, looked down at her feet.
She had no leather boots on. Her
bare legs were coated from the knee down with smooth, brown, drying mud. Her skirts were bunched, caught up into the waistband.
“You’ve been frogging, have you, Heather?”
She nodded vacantly.
“I’ll go tell Aunty,” she said, beginning in a whisper and ending with a bellow, and bolted back the way she had come.
“She’s a good soul,” Sparrowhawk said. “She used to help my wife. She lives with our witch now and helps her. I don’t think you’ll object to entering a witch’s house?”
“Never in the world, my lord.”
“Many do. Nobles and common folk, wizards and sorcerers.”
“Lily my wife was a witch.”
Sparrowhawk bowed his head and walked in silence for a while. “How did she learn of her gift, Alder?”
“It was born in her. As a child she’d make a torn branch grow on the tree again, and other children brought her their broken toys to mend. But when her father saw her do that he would strike her hands. Her family were considerable persons in their town. Respectable persons,” Alder said in his even, gentle voice. “They didn’t want her consorting with witches. Since it would keep her from marriage with a respectable man. So she kept all her study to herself. And the witches of her town would have nothing to do with her, even when she sought to learn from them, for they were afraid of her father, you see. Then a rich man came to court her, for she was beautiful, as I told you, my lord. More beautiful than I could say. And her father told her she was to be married. She ran away that night. She lived by herself, wandering, for some years. A witch here and there took her in, but she kept herself by her skill.”
“It’s not a big island, Taon.”
“Her father wouldn’t seek her. He said no tinker witch was his daughter.”
Again Sparrowhawk bowed his head. “So she heard of you, and came to you.”
“But she taught me more than I could teach her,” Alder said earnestly. “It was a great gift she had.”
“I believe it.”
They had come to a little house or big hut, set down in a dell, with witch hazel and broom in tangles about it, and a goat on the roof, and a flock of white-speckled black hens squawking away, and a lazy little sheepdog bitch standing up and thinking about barking and thinking better of it and waving her tail.