Tales From Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
“Who’s to lay this floor?” he said, now merely querulous.
Silence nodded, meaning himself.
The boy was in fact a workman of the first order, carpenter, cabinetmaker, stonelayer, roofer; he had proved that when he lived up here as Dulse’s student, and his life with the rich folk of Gont Port had not softened his hands. He brought the boards from Sixth’s mill in Re Albi, driving Gammer’s ox-team; he laid the floor and polished it the next day, while the old wizard was up at Bog Lake gathering simples. When Dulse came home there it was, shining like a dark lake itself. “Have to wash my feet every time I come in,” he grumbled. He walked in gingerly. The wood was so smooth it seemed soft to the bare sole. “Satin,” he said. “You didn’t do all that in one day without a spell or two. A village hut with a palace floor. Well, it’ll be a sight, come winter, to see the fire shine in that! Or do I have to get me a carpet now? A fleecefell, on a golden warp?”
Silence smiled. He was pleased with himself.
He had turned up on Dulse’s doorstep a few years ago. Well, no, twenty years ago it must be, or twenty-five. A while ago now. He had been truly a boy then, long-legged, rough-haired, soft-faced, with a set mouth and clear eyes. “What do you want?” the wizard had asked, knowing what he wanted, what they all wanted, and keeping his eyes from those clear eyes. He was a good teacher, the best on Gont, he knew that. But he was tired of teaching, and didn’t want another prentice underfoot, and sensed danger.
“To learn,” the boy whispered.
“Go to Roke,” the wizard said. The boy wore shoes and a good leather vest. He could afford or earn ship’s passage to the School.
“I’ve been there.”
At that Dulse looked him over again. No cloak, no staff.
“Failed? Sent away? Ran away?”
The boy shook his head at each question. He shut his eyes; his mouth was already shut. He stood there, intensely gathered, suffering: drew breath: looked straight into the wizard’s eyes.
“My mastery is here, on Gont,” he said, still speaking hardly above a whisper. “My master is Heleth”.
At that the wizard whose true name was Heleth stood as still as he did, looking back at him, till the boy’s gaze dropped.
In silence Dulse sought his name, and saw two things: a fir-cone, and the rune of the Closed Mouth. Then seeking further he heard in his mind a name spoken; but he did not speak it.
“I’m tired of teaching and talking,” he said. “I need silence. Is that enough for you?”
The boy nodded once.
“Then to me you are Silence,” the wizard said. “You can sleep in the nook under the west window. There’s an old pallet in the woodhouse. Air it. Don’t bring mice in with it.” And he stalked off towards the Overfell, angry with the boy for coming and with himself for giving in; but it was not anger that made his heart pound. Striding along-he could stride, then-with the seawind pushing at him always from the left and the early sunlight on the sea out past the vast shadow of the mountain, he thought of the Mages of Roke, the masters of the art magic, the professors of mystery and power. “He was too much for ‘em, was he? And he’ll be too much for me,” he thought, and smiled. He was a peaceful man, but he did not mind a bit of danger.
He stopped and felt the dirt under his feet. He was barefoot, as usual. When he was a student on Roke, he had worn shoes. But he had come back home to Gont, to Re Albi, with his wizard’s staff, and kicked his shoes off. He stood still and felt the dust and rock of the cliff-top path under his feet, and the cliffs under that, and the roots of the island in the dark under that. In the dark under the waters all islands touched and were one. So his teacher Ard had said, and so his teachers on Roke had said. But this was his island, his rock, dust, dirt. His wizardry grew out of it. “My mastery is here,” the boy had said, but it went deeper than mastery. That, perhaps, was something Dulse could teach him: what went deeper than mastery. What he had learned here, on Gont, before he ever went to Roke.
And the boy must have a staff. Why had Nemmerle let him leave Roke without one, empty-handed as a prentice or a witch? Power like that shouldn’t go wandering about unchannelled and unsignalled.
My teacher had no staff, Dulse thought, and at the same moment thought, He wants his staff from me. Gontish oak, from the hands of a Gontish wizard. Well, if he earns it I’ll make him one. If he can keep his mouth closed. And I’ll leave him my lore-books. If he can clean out a henhouse, and understand the Glosses of Danemer, and keep his mouth closed.
The new student cleaned out the henhouse and hoed the bean-patch, learned the meaning of the Glosses of Danemer and the Arcana of the Enlades, and kept his mouth closed. He listened. He heard what Dulse said; sometimes he heard what Dulse thought. He did what Dulse wanted and what Dulse did not know he wanted. His gift was far beyond Dulse’s guidance, yet he had been right to come to Re Albi, and they both knew it.
Dulse thought sometimes in those years about sons and fathers. He had quarreled with his own father, a sorcerer-prospector, over his choice of a teacher; his father had shouted that a student of Ard’s was no son of his, had nursed his rage and died unforgiving.
Dulse had seen young men weep for joy at the birth of a first son. He had seen poor men pay witches a year’s earnings for the promise of a healthy boy, and a rich man touch his gold-bedizened baby’s face and whisper, adoring, “My immortality!” He had seen men beat their sons, bully and humiliate them, spite and thwart them, hating the death they saw in them. He had seen the answering hatred in the son’s eyes, the threat, the pitiless contempt. And seeing it, Dulse knew why he had never sought reconciliation with his father.
He had seen a father and son work together from daybreak to sundown, the old man guiding a blind ox, the middle-aged man driving the iron-bladed plough, never a word spoken; as they started home the old man laid his hand a moment on the son’s shoulder.
He had always remembered that. He remembered it now, when he looked across the hearth, winter evenings, at the dark face bent above a lore-book or a shirt that needed mending. The eyes cast down, the mouth closed, the spirit listening.
“Once in his lifetime, if he’s lucky, a wizard finds somebody he can talk to.” Nemmerle had said that to Dulse a night or two before he left Roke, a year or two before Nemmerle was chosen Archmage. He had been the Master Patterner and the kindest of all Dulse’s teachers at the School. “I think, if you stayed, Heleth, we could talk.”
Dulse had been unable to answer at all for a while. Then, stammering, guilty at his ingratitude and incredulous at his obstinacy-“Master, I would stay, but my work is on Gont-I wish it was here, with you-“
“It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be. Well, send me a student now and then. Roke needs Gontish wizardry. I think we’re leaving things out, here, things worth knowing....”
Dulse had sent students on to the School, three or four of them, nice lads with a gift for this or that; but the one Nemmerle waited for had come and gone of his own will, and what they had thought of him on Roke Dulse did not know. Silence did not say. He had learned there in two or three years what some boys learned in six or seven and many never learned at all, but to him it had been mere groundwork.
“Why didn’t you come to me first?” Dulse had demanded. “And then Roke, to put a polish on it?”
“I didn’t want to waste your time.”
“Did Nemmerle know you were coming to work with me?”
Silence shook his head.
“If you’d deigned to tell him your intentions, he might have sent a message to me.”
Silence looked stricken. “Was he your friend?”
Dulse paused. “He was my master. Would have been my friend, perhaps, if I’d stayed on Roke. Have wizards friends? No more than they have wives, or sons, some would say.... Once he said to me that in our trade it’s a lucky man who finds someone to talk to. Keep that in mind. If you’re lucky, one day you’ll have to op
Silence bowed his rough, thoughtful head.
“If it hasn’t rusted shut,” Dulse added.
“If you ask me to, I’ll talk,” the young man said, so earnest, so willing to deny his whole nature at Dulse’s request that the wizard had to laugh.
“I asked you not to,” he said, “and it’s not my need I spoke of. I talk enough for two. Never mind. You’ll know what to say when the time comes. That’s the art, eh? What to say, and when to say it. And the rest is silence.”
The young man slept on a pallet under the little west window of Dulse’s house for three years. He learned wizardry, fed the chickens, milked the cow. He suggested, once, that Dulse keep goats. He had not said anything for a week or so, a cold, wet week of autumn. He said, “You might keep some goats.”
Dulse had the big lore-book open on the table. He had been trying to reweave one of the Acastan Spells, much broken and made powerless by the Emanations of Fundaur centuries ago. He had just begun to get a sense of the missing word that might fill one of the gaps, he almost had it, and-“You might keep some goats,” Silence said.
Dulse considered himself a wordy, impatient man with a short temper. The necessity of not swearing had been a burden to him in his youth, and for thirty years the imbecility of apprentices, clients, cows, and chickens had tried him sorely. Apprentices and clients were afraid of his tongue, though cows and chickens paid no attention to his outbursts. He had never been angry at Silence before. There was a very long pause.
“What for?”
Silence apparently did not notice the pause or the extreme softness of Dulse’s voice. “Milk, cheese, roast kid, company,” he said.
“Have you ever kept goats?” Dulse asked, in the same soft, polite voice.
Silence shook his head.
He was in fact a town boy, born in Gont Port. He had said nothing about himself, but Dulse had asked around a bit. The father, a longshoreman, had died in the big earthquake, when Silence would have been seven or eight; the mother was a cook at a waterfront inn. At twelve the boy had got into some kind of trouble, probably messing about with magic, and his mother had managed to prentice him to Elassen, a respectable sorcerer in Valmouth. There the boy had picked up his true name, and some skill in carpentry and farmwork, if not much else; and Elassen had had the generosity, after three years, to pay his passage to Roke. That was all Dulse knew about him.
“I dislike goat cheese,” Dulse said.
Silence nodded, acceptant as always.
From time to time in the years since then, Dulse remembered how he hadn’t lost his temper when Silence asked about keeping goats; and each time the memory gave him a quiet satisfaction, like that of finishing the last bite of a perfectly ripe pear.
After spending the next several days trying to recapture the missing word, he had set Silence to studying the Acastan Spells. Together they had finally worked it out, a long toil. “Like ploughing with a blind ox,” Dulse said.
Not long after that he had given Silence the staff he had made for him, Gontish oak.
And the Lord of Gont Port had tried once again to get Dulse to come down to do what needed doing in Gont Port, and Dulse had sent Silence down instead, and there he had stayed.
And Dulse was standing on his own doorstep, three eggs in his hand and the rain running cold down his back.
How long had he been standing here? Why was he standing here? He had been thinking about mud, about the floor, about Silence. Had he been out walking on the path above the Overfell? No, that was years ago, years ago, in the sunlight. It was raining. He had fed the chickens, and come back to the house with three eggs, they were still warm in his hand, silky brown lukewarm eggs, and the sound of thunder was still in his mind, the vibration of thunder was in his bones, in his feet. Thunder?
No. There had been a thunderclap, a while ago. This was not thunder. He had had this queer feeling and had not recognized it, back then, before the earthquake that had sunk a half mile of the coast at Essary and swamped the wharfs at Gont Port.
He stepped down from the doorstep onto the dirt so that he could feel the ground with the nerves of his soles, but the mud slimed and fouled any messages the dirt had for him. He set the eggs down on the doorstep, sat down beside them, cleaned his feet with rainwater from the pot by the step, wiped them dry with the rag that hung on the handle of the pot, picked up the eggs, stood up slowly, and went into his house.
He gave a sharp look at his staff, which leaned in the corner behind the door. He put the eggs in the larder, ate an apple quickly because he was hungry, and took his staff. It was yew, bound at the foot with copper, worn to silk at the grip. Nemmerle had given it to him.
“Stand!” he said to it in its language, and let go of it. It stood as if he had driven it into a socket.
“To the root,” he said impatiently, in the language of the Making. “To the root!”
He watched the staff that stood on the shining floor. In a little while he saw it quiver very slightly, a shiver, a tremble.
“Ah, ah, ah,” said the old wizard.
“What should I do?” he said aloud after a while.
The staff swayed, was still, shivered again.
“Enough of that, my dear,” Dulse said, laying his hand on it. “Come now. No wonder I kept thinking about Silence. I should send for him ... send to him ... No. What did Ard say? Find the center, find the center. That’s the question to ask. That’s what to do...” As he muttered on to himself, routing out his heavy cloak, setting water to boil on the small fire he had lighted earlier, he wondered if he had always talked to himself, if he had talked all the time when Silence lived with him. No, it had become a habit after Silence left, he thought, with the bit of his mind that went on thinking the ordinary thoughts of life, while the rest of it made preparations for terror and destruction.
He hard-boiled the three new eggs and one already in the larder and put them into a pouch along with four apples and a bladder of resinated wine, in case he had to stay out all night. He shrugged arthritically into his heavy cloak, took up his staff, told the fire to go out, and left.
He no longer kept a cow. He stood looking into the poultry yard, considering. The fox had been visiting the orchard lately. But the birds would have to forage if he stayed away. They must take their chances, like everyone else. He opened their gate a little. Though the rain was no more than a misty drizzle now, they stayed hunched up under the henhouse eaves, disconsolate. The King had not crowed once this morning.
“Have you anything to tell me?” Dulse asked them.
Brown Bucca, his favorite, shook herself and said her name a few times. The others said nothing.
“Well, take care. I saw the fox on the full-moon night,” Dulse said, and went on his way.
As he walked he thought; he thought hard; he recalled. He recalled all he could of matters his teacher had spoken of once only and long ago. Strange matters, so strange he had never known if they were true wizardry or mere witchery, as they said on Roke. Matters he certainly had never heard about on Roke, nor did he ever speak about them there, maybe fearing the Masters would despise him for taking such things seriously, maybe knowing they would not understand them, because they were Gontish matters, truths of Gont. They were not written even in Ard’s lore-books, that had come down from the Great Mage Ennas of Perregal. They were all word of mouth. They were home truths.
“If you need to read the Mountain,” his teacher had told him, “go to the Dark Pond at the top of Semere’s cow pasture. You can see the ways from there. You need to find the center. See where to go in.”
“Go in?” the boy Dulse had whispered.
“What could you do from outside?”
Dulse was silent for a long time, and then said, “How?”
“Thus.” And Ard’s long arms had stretched out and upward in the invocation of what Dulse would know later was a great spell of Transforming. Ard spoke the words of the spell awry, as teachers of wizardry must do lest th
“But you can’t undo this!” he said aloud.
Ard nodded. “It is irrevocable”.
Dulse knew no transformation that was irrevocable, no spell that could not be unsaid, except the Word of Unbinding, which is spoken only once.
“But why-?”
“At need,” Ard said.
Dulse knew better than to ask for explanation. The need to speak such a spell could not come often; the chance of his ever having to use it was very slight. He let the terrible spell sink down in his mind and be hidden and layered over with a thousand useful or beautiful or enlightening mageries and charms, all the lore and rules of Roke, all the wisdom of the books Ard had bequeathed him. Crude, monstrous, useless, it lay in the dark of his mind for sixty years, like the cornerstone of an earlier, forgotten house down in the cellar of a mansion full of lights and treasures and children.
The rain had ceased, though mist still hid the peak and shreds of cloud drifted through the high forests. Dulse was not a tireless walker like Silence, who would have spent his life wandering in the forests of Gont Mountain if he could; but he had been born in Re Albi and knew the roads and ways around it as part of himself. He took the shortcut at Rissi’s well and came out before midday on Semere’s high pasture, a level step on the mountainside. A mile below it, all sunlit now, the farm buildings stood in the lee of a hill, across which a flock of sheep moved like a cloud-shadow. Gont Port and its bay were hidden under the steep, knotted hills that stood above the city.
Dulse wandered about a bit before he found what he took to be the Dark Pond. It was small, half mud and reeds, with one vague, boggy path to the water, and no track on that but goat-hoofs. The water was dark, though it lay out under the bright sky and far above the peat soils. Dulse followed the goat-tracks, growling when his foot slipped in the mud and he wrenched his ankle to keep from falling. At the brink of the water he stood still. He stooped to rub his ankle. He listened.