Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin
“Spark!” she cried, and scattered the poultry, running to him.
“Well, well,” he said. “Don’t carry on.”
He let her embrace him and stroke his face. He came in and sat down in the kitchen, at the table.
“Have you eaten? Did you see Apple?”
“I could eat.”
She rummaged in the well-stocked larder. “What ship are you on? Still the Gull?”
“No.” A pause. “My ship’s broke up.”
She turned in horror—“Wrecked?”
“No.” He smiled without humor. “Crews broke up. King’s men took her over.”
“But—it wasn’t a pirate ship—”
“No.”
“Then why—?”
“Said the captain was running some goods they wanted,” he said, unwillingly. He was as thin as ever, but looked older, tanned dark, lank-haired, with a long, narrow face like Flint’s but still narrower, harder.
“Where’s dad?” he said.
Tenar stood still.
“You didn’t stop by your sister’s.”
“No,” he said, indifferent.
“Flint died three years ago,” she said. “Of a stroke. In the fields—on the path up from the lambing pens. Clearbrook found him. It was three years ago.”
There was a silence. He did not know what to say, or had nothing to say.
She put food before him. He began to eat so hungrily that she set out more at once.
“When did you eat last?”
He shrugged, and ate.
She sat down across the table from him. Late-spring sunshine poured in the low window across the table and shone on the brass fender in the hearth.
He pushed the plate away at last.
“So who’s been running the farm?” he asked.
“What’s that to you, son?” she asked him, gently but drily.
“It’s mine,” he said, in a rather similar tone.
After a minute Tenar got up and cleared his dishes away. “So it is.”
“You can stay, o’ course,” he said, very awkwardly, perhaps attempting to joke; but he was not a joking man. “Old Clearbrook still around?”
“They’re all still here. And a man called Hawk, and a child I keep. Here. In the house. You’ll have to sleep in the loft-room. I’ll put the ladder up.” She faced him again. “Are you here for a stay, then?”
“I might be.”
So Flint had answered her questions for twenty years, denying her right to ask them by never answering yes or no, maintaining a freedom based on her ignorance; a poor, narrow sort of freedom, she thought.
“Poor lad,” she said, “your crew broken up, and your father dead, and strangers in your house, all in a day. You’ll want some time to get used to it all. I’m sorry, my son. But I’m glad you’re here. I thought of you often, on the seas, in the storms, in winter.”
He said nothing. He had nothing to offer, and was unable to accept. He pushed back his chair and was about to get up when Therru came in. He stared, half-risen—“What happened to her?” he said.
“She was burned. Here’s my son I told you about, Therru, the sailor, Spark. Therru’s your sister, Spark.”
“Sister!”
“By adoption.”
“Sister!” he said again, and looked around the kitchen as if for witness, and stared at his mother. She stared back.
He went out, going wide of Therru, who stood motionless. He slammed the door behind him.
Tenar started to speak to Therru and could not.
“Don’t cry,” said the child who did not cry, coming to her, touching her arm. “Did he hurt you?”
“Oh Therru! Let me hold you!” She sat down at the table with Therru on her lap and in her arms, though the girl was getting big to be held, and had never learned how to do it easily. But Tenar held her and wept, and Therru bent her scarred face down against Tenar’s, till it was wet with tears.
Ged and Spark came in at dusk from opposite ends of the farm. Spark had evidently talked with Clearbrook and thought the situation over, and Ged was evidently trying to size it up. Very little was said at supper, and that cautiously. Spark made no complaint about not having his own room back, but ran up the ladder to the storage-loft like the sailor he was, and was apparently satisfied with the bed his mother had made him there, for he did not come back down till late in the morning.
He wanted breakfast then, and expected it to be served to him. His father had always been waited on by mother, wife, daughter. Was he less a man than his father? Was she to prove it to him? She served him his meal and cleared it away for him, and went back to the orchard where she and Therru and Shandy were burning off a plague of tent caterpillars that threatened to destroy the new-set fruit.
Spark went off to join Clearbrook and Tiff. And he stayed mostly with them, as the days passed. The heavy work requiring muscle and the skilled work with crops and sheep was done by Ged, Shandy, and Tenar, while the two old men who had been there all their lives, his fathers men, took him about and told him how they managed it all, and truly believed they were managing it all, and shared their belief with him.
Tenar became miserable in the house. Only outdoors, at the farmwork, did she have relief from the anger, the shame that Sparks presence brought her.
“My turn,” she said to Ged, bitterly, in the starlit darkness of their room. “My turn to lose what I was proudest of.”
“What have you lost?”
“My son. The son I did not bring up to be a man. I failed. I failed him.” She bit her lip, gazing dry-eyed into the dark.
Ged did not try to argue with her or persuade her out of her grief. He asked, “Do you think he’ll stay?”
“Yes. He’s afraid to try and go back to sea. He didn’t tell me the truth, or not all the truth, about his ship. He was second mate. I suppose he was involved in carrying stolen goods. Secondhand piracy. I don’t care. Gontish sailors are all half-pirate. But he lies about it. He lies. He is jealous of you. A dishonest, envious man.”
“Frightened, I think,” Ged said. “Not wicked. And it is his farm.”
“Then he can have it! And may it be as generous to him as—”
“No, dear love,” Ged said, catching her with both voice and hands—“don’t speak—don’t say the evil word!” He was so urgent, so passionately earnest, that her anger turned right about into the love that was its source, and she cried, “I wouldn’t curse him, or this place! I didn’t mean it! Only it makes me so sorry, so ashamed! I am so sorry, Ged!”
“No, no, no. My dear, I don’t care what the boy thinks of me. But he’s very hard on you.”
“And Therru. He treats her like—He said, he said to me, ‘What did she do, to look like that?’ What did she do—!”
Ged stroked her hair, as he often did, with a light, slow, repeated caress that would make them both sleepy with loving pleasure.
“I could go off goat-herding again,” he said at last. “It would make things easier for you here. Except for the work....”
“I’d rather come with you.”
He stroked her hair, and seemed to be considering. “I suppose we might,” he said. “There were a couple of families up there sheep-herding, above Lissu. But then comes the winter....”
“Maybe some farmer would take us on. I know the work—and sheep—and you know goats—and you’re quick at everything—”
“Useful with pitchforks,” he murmured, and got a little sob of a laugh from her.
The next morning Spark was up early to breakfast with them, for he was going fishing with old Tiff. He got up from the table, saying with a better grace than usual, “I’ll bring a mess of fish for supper.
Tenar had made resolves overnight. She said, “Wait; you can clear off the table, Spark. Set the dishes in the sink and put water on ’em. They’ll be washed with the supper things.”
He stared a moment and said, “That’s women’s work,” putting on his cap.
“It’s anybody’s work w
“Not mine,” he said flatly, and went out.
She followed him. She stood on the doorstep. “Hawk’s, but not yours?” she demanded.
He merely nodded, going on across the yard.
“It’s too late,” she said, turning back to the kitchen. “Failed, failed.” She could feel the lines in her face, stiff, beside the mouth, between the eyes. “You can water a stone,” she said, “but it won’t grow.”
“You have to start when they’re young and tender,” Ged said. “Like me.”
This time she couldn’t laugh.
They came back to the house from the day’s work and saw a man talking with Spark at the front gate.
“That’s the fellow from Re Albi, isn’t it?” said Ged, whose eyes were very good.
“Come along, Therru,” Tenar said, for the child had stopped short. “What fellow?” She was rather nearsighted, and squinted across the yard. “Oh, it’s what’s his name, the sheep-dealer. Townsend. What’s he back here for, the carrion crow!”
Her mood all day had been fierce, and Ged and Therru wisely said nothing.
She went to the men at the gate.
“Did you come about the ewe lambs, Townsend? You’re a year late; but there’s some of this year’s yet in the fold.”
“So the master’s been telling me,” said Townsend.
“Has he,” said Tenar.
Spark’s face went darker than ever at her tone.
“I won’t interrupt you and the master, then,” said she, and was turning away when Townsend spoke: “I’ve got a message for you, Goha.”
“Third time’s the charm.”
“The old witch, you know, old Moss, she’s in a bad way. She said, since I was coming down to Middle Valley, she said, Tell Mistress Goha I’d like to see her before I die, if there’s a chance of her coming.’”
Crow, carrion crow, Tenar thought, looking with hatred at the bearer of bad news.
“She’s ill?”
“Sick to death,” Townsend said, with a kind of smirk that might be intended for sympathy. “Took sick in the winter, and she’s failing fast, and so she said to tell you she wants bad to see you, before she dies.”
“Thank you for bringing the message,” Tenar said soberly, and turned to go to the house. Townsend went on with Spark to the sheepfolds.
As they prepared dinner, Tenar said to Ged and Therru, “I must go.”
“Of course,” Ged said. “The three of us, if you like.”
“Would you?” For the first time that day her face lightened, the storm cloud lifted. “Oh,” she said, “that’s—that’s good—I didn’t want to ask, I thought maybe—Therru, would you like to go back to the little house, Ogion’s house, for a while?”
Therru stood still to think. “I could see my peach tree,” she said.
“Yes, and Heather—and Sippy—and Moss—poor Moss! Oh, I have longed, I have longed to go back up there, but it didn’t seem right. There was the farm to run—and all—”
It seemed to her that there was some other reason she had not gone back, had not let herself think of going back, had not even known till now that she yearned to go; but whatever the reason was it slipped away like a shadow, a word forgotten. “Has anyone looked after Moss, I wonder, did anyone send for a healer. She’s the only healer on the Overfell, but there’s people down in Gont Port who could help her, surely. Oh, poor Moss! I want to go—It’s too late, but tomorrow, tomorrow early. And the master can make his own breakfast!”
“He’ll learn,” said Ged.
“No, he won’t. He’ll find some fool woman to do it for him. Ah!” She looked around the kitchen, her face bright and fierce. “I hate to leave her the twenty years I’ve scoured that table. I hope she appreciates it!”
Spark brought Townsend in for supper, but the sheep-dealer would not stay the night, though he was of course offered a bed in common hospitality. It would have been one of their beds, and Tenar did not like the thought. She was glad to see him go off to his hosts in the village in the blue twilight of the spring evening.
“We’ll be off to Re Albi first thing tomorrow, son,” she said to Spark. “Hawk and Therru and I.”
He looked a little frightened.
“Just go off like that?”
“So you went; so you came,” said his mother. “Now look here, Spark: this is your father’s money-box. There’s seven ivory pieces in it, and those credit counters from old Bridgeman, but he’ll never pay, he hasn’t got anything to pay with. These four Andradean pieces Flint got from selling sheepskins to the ship’s outfitter in Valmouth four years running, back when you were a boy. These three Havnorian ones are what Tholy paid us for the High Creek farm. I had your father buy that farm, and I helped him clear it and sell it. I’ll take those three pieces, for I’ve earned them. The rest, and the farm, is yours. You’re the master.” The tall, thin young man stood there with his gaze on the money-box.
“Take it all. I don’t want it,” he said in a low voice.
“I don’t need it. But I thank you, my son. Keep the four pieces. When you marry, call them my gift to your wife.”
She put the box away in the place behind the big plate on the top shelf of the dresser, where Flint had always kept it. “Therru, get your things ready now, because we’ll go very early.”
“When are you coming back?” Spark asked, and the tone of his voice made Tenar think of the restless, frail child he had been. But she said only, “I don’t know, my dear. If you need me, I’ll come.”
She busied herself getting out their travel shoes and packs. “Spark,” she said, “you can do something for me.”
He had sat down in the hearthseat, looking uncertain and morose. “What?”
“Go down to Valmouth, soon, and see your sister. And tell her that I’ve gone back to the Overfell. Tell her, if she wants me, just send word.”
He nodded. He watched Ged, who had already packed his few belongings with the neatness and dispatch of one who had traveled much, and was now putting up the dishes to leave the kitchen in good order. That done, he sat down opposite Spark to run a new cord through the eyelets of his pack to close it at the top.
“There’s a knot they use for that,” Spark said. “Sailor’s knot.”
Ged silently handed the pack across the hearth, and watched as Spark silently demonstrated the knot.
“Slips up, see,” he said, and Ged nodded.
They left the farm in the dark and cold of the morning. Sunlight comes late to the western side of Gont Mountain, and only walking kept them warm till at last the sun got round the great mass of the south peak and shone on their backs.
Therru was twice the walker she had been the summer before, but it was still a two days’ journey for them. Along in the afternoon, Tenar asked, “Shall we try to get on to Oak Springs today? There’s a sort of inn. We had a cup of milk there, remember, Therru?”
Ged was looking up the mountainside with a faraway expression. “There’s a place I know....”
“Fine,” said Tenar.
A little before they came to the high corner of the road from which Gont Port could first be seen, Ged turned aside from the road into the forest that covered the steep slopes above it. The westering sun sent slanting red-gold rays into the darkness between the trunks and under the branches. They climbed half a mile or so, on no path Tenar could see, and came out on a little step or shelf of the mountainside, a meadow sheltered from the wind by the cliffs behind it and the trees about it. From there one could see the heights of the mountain to the north, and between the tops of great firs there was one clear view of the western sea. It was entirely silent there except when the wind breathed in the firs. One mountain lark sang long and sweet, away up in the sunlight, before dropping to her nest in the untrodden grass.
The three of them ate their bread and cheese. They watched darkness rise up the mountain from the sea. They made their bed of cloaks and slept, Therru next to Tenar next to Ged. In the d
She woke in the grey morning to see Ged sitting up beside her, his cloak pulled round his shoulders, looking out through the gap westward. His dark face was quite still, full of silence, as she had seen it once long ago on the beach of Atuan. His eyes were not downcast, as then; he looked into the illimitable west. Looking with him she saw the day coming, the glory of rose and gold reflected clear across the sky.
He turned to her, and she said to him, “I have loved you since I first saw you.”
“Life-giver,” he said and leaned forward, kissing her breast and mouth. She held him a moment. They got up, and waked Therru, and went on their way; but as they entered the trees Tenar looked back once at the little meadow as if charging it to keep faith with her happiness there.
The first day of the journey their goal had been journeying. This day they would come to Re Albi. So Tenar’s mind was much on Aunty Moss, wondering what had befallen her and whether she was indeed dying. But as the day and the way went on her mind would not hold to the thought of Moss, or any thought. She was tired. She did not like walking this way again to death. They passed Oak Springs, and went down into the gorge, and started up again. By the last long uphill stretch to the Overfell, her legs were hard to lift, and her mind was stupid and confused, fastening upon one word or image until it became meaningless—the dish-cupboard in Ogion’s house, or the words bone dolphin, which came into her head from seeing Therru’s grass bag of toys, and repeated themselves endlessly.
Ged strode along at his easy travelers gait, and Therru trudged right beside him, the same Therru who had worn out on this long climb less than a year ago, and had to be carried. But that had been after a longer day of walking. And the child had still been recovering from her punishment.
She was getting old, too old to walk so far so fast. It was so hard going uphill. An old woman should stay home by her fireside. The bone dolphin, the bone dolphin. Bone, bound, the binding spell. The bone man and the bone animal. There they went ahead. They were waiting for her. She was slow. She was tired. She toiled on up the last stretch of the hill and came up to them where the road came out on the level of the Overfell. To the left were the roofs of Re Albi slanting down towards the cliff’s edge. To the right the road went up to the manor house. “This way,” Tenar said.