Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin
She did not know what they made of Sparrowhawk, of his presence and nonpresence, in the village. Ogion, aloof and silent and in some ways feared, had been their own mage and their fellow-villager. Sparrowhawk they might be proud of as a name, the archmage who had lived awhile in Re Albi and done wonderful things, fooling a dragon in the Ninety Isles, bringing the Ring of Erreth-Akbe back from somewhere or other; but they did not know him. Nor did he know them. He had not gone into the village since he came, only to the forest, the wilderness. She had not thought about it before, but he avoided the village as surely as Therru did.
They must have talked about him. It was a village, and people talked. But gossip about the doings of wizards and mages would not go far. The matter was too uncanny, the lives of men of power were too strange, too different from their own. “Let be,” she had heard villagers in the Middle Valley say when somebody got to speculating too freely about a visiting weatherworker or their own wizard, Beech—“Let be. He goes his way, not ours.”
As for herself, that she should have stayed on to nurse and serve such a man of power would not seem a questionable matter to them; again it was a case of “Let be.” She had not been very much in the village herself; they were neither friendly nor unfriendly to her. She had lived there once in Weaver Fan’s cottage, she was the old mage’s ward, he had sent Townsend down round the mountain for her; all that was very well. But then she had come with the child, terrible to look at, who’d walk about in daylight with it by choice? And what kind of woman would be a wizard’s pupil, a wizard’s nurse? Witchery there, sure enough, and foreign too. But all the same, she was wife to a rich farmer way down there in the Middle Valley; though he was dead and she a widow. Well, who could understand the ways of the witchfolk? Let be, better let be....
She met the Archmage of Earthsea as he came past the garden fence. She said, “They say there’s a ship in from the City of Havnor.”
He stopped. He made a movement, quickly controlled, but it had been the beginning of a turn to run, to break and run like a mouse from a hawk.
“Ged!” she said. “What is it?”
“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t face them.”
“Who?”
“Men from him. From the king.”
His face had gone greyish, as when he was first here, and he looked around for a place to hide.
His terror was so urgent and undefended that she thought only how to spare him. “You needn’t see them. If anybody comes I’ll send them away. Come back to the house now. You haven’t eaten all day.”
“There was a man there,” he said.
“Townsend, pricing goats. I sent him away. Come on!
He came with her, and when they were in the house she shut the door.
“They couldn’t harm you, surely, Ged. Why would they want to?”
He sat down at the table and shook his head dully. “No, no.”
“Do they know you’re here?”
“I don’t know.”
“What is it you’re afraid of?” she asked, not impatiently, but with some rational authority.
He put his hands across his face, rubbing his temples and forehead, looking down. “I was—” he said. “I’m not—”
It was all he could say.
She stopped him, saying, “All right, it’s all right.” She dared not touch him lest she worsen his humiliation by any semblance of pity. She was angry at him, and for him. “It’s none of their business,” she said, “where you are, or who you are, or what you choose to do or not to do! If they come prying they can leave curious.” That was Lark’s saying. She had a pang of longing for the company of an ordinary, sensible woman. “Anyhow, the ship may have nothing at all to do with you. They may be chasing pirates home. It’ll be a good thing, too, when the king gets around to doing that.... I found some wine in the back of the cupboard, a couple of bottles, I wonder how long Ogion had it squirreled away there. I think we’d both do well with a glass of wine. And some bread and cheese. The little one’s had her dinner and gone off with Heather to catch frogs. There may be frogs’ legs for supper. But bread and cheese for now. And wine. I wonder where it’s from, who brought it to Ogion, how old it is?” So she talked along, woman’s babble, saving him from having to make any answer or misread any silence, until he had got over the crisis of shame, and eaten a little, and drunk a glass of the old, soft, red wine.
“It’s best I go, Tenar,” he said. “Till I learn to be what I am now.”
“Go where?”
“Up on the mountain.”
“Wandering—like Ogion?” She looked at him. She remembered walking with him on the roads of Atuan, deriding him: “Do wizards often beg?” And he had answered, “Yes, but they try to give something in exchange.”
She asked cautiously, “Could you get on for a while as a weatherworker, or a finder?” She filled his glass full.
He shook his head. He drank wine, and looked away. “No,” he said. “None of that. Nothing of that.”
She did not believe him. She wanted to rebel, to deny, to say to him, How can it be, how can you say that—as if you’d forgotten all you know, all you learned from Ogion, and at Roke, and in your traveling! You can’t have forgotten the words, the names, the acts of your art. You learned, you earned your power!—She kept herself from saying that, but she murmured, “I don’t understand. How can it all...”
“A cup of water,” he said, tipping his glass a little as if to pour it out. And after a while, “What I don’t understand is why he brought me back. The kindness of the young is cruelty.... So I’m here, I have to get on with it, till I can go back.”
She did not know clearly what he meant, but she heard a note of blame or complaint that, in him, shocked and angered her. She spoke stiffly: “It was Kalessin that brought you here.”
It was dark in the house with the door closed and only the small western window letting in the late-afternoon light. She could not make out his expression; but presently he raised his glass to her with a shadowy smile, and drank.
“This wine,” he said. “Some great merchant or pirate must have brought it to Ogion. I never drank its equal. Even in Havnor.” He turned the squat glass in his hands, looking down at it. “I’ll call myself something,” he said, “and go across the mountain, to Armouth and the East Forest country, where I came from. They’ll be making hay. There’s always work at haying and harvest.”
She did not know how to answer. Fragile and ill-looking, he would be given such work only out of charity or brutality; and if he got it he would not be able to do it.
“The roads aren’t like they used to be,” she said. “These last years, there’s thieves and gangs everywhere. Foreign riffraff, as my friend Townsend says. But it’s not safe any more to go alone.”
Looking at him in the dusky light to see how he took this, she wondered sharply for a moment what it must be like never to have feared a human being—what it would be like to have to learn to be afraid.
“Ogion still went—” he began, and then set his mouth; he had recalled that Ogion had been a mage.
“Down in the south part of the island,” Tenar said, “there’s a lot of herding. Sheep, goats, cattle. They drive them up into the hills before the Long Dance, and pasture them there until the rains. They’re always needing herders.” She drank a mouthful of the wine. It was like the dragon’s name in her mouth. “But why can’t you just stay here?”
“Not in Ogion’s house. The first place they’ll come.”
“Well, what if they do come? What will they want of you?”
“To be what I was.”
The desolation of his voice chilled her.
She was silent, trying to remember what it was like to have been powerful, to be the Eaten One, the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, and then to lose that, throw it away, become only Tenar, only herself. She thought about how it was to have been a woman in the prime of life, with children and a man, and then to lose all that, becoming old and a widow, powerl
Or maybe Aunty Moss was right, and when the meat was out the shell was empty.
Witch-thoughts, she thought. And to turn his mind and her own, and because the soft, fiery wine made her wits and tongue quick, she said, “Do you know, I’ve thought—about Ogion teaching me, and I wouldn’t go on, but went and found myself my farmer and married him—I thought, when I did that, I thought on my wedding day, Ged will be angry when he hears of this!” She laughed as she spoke.
“I was,” he said.
She waited.
He said, “I was disappointed.”
“Angry,” she said.
“Angry,” he said.
He poured her glass full.
“I had the power to know power, then,” he said. “And you—you shone, in that terrible place, the Labyrinth, that darkness....”
“Well, then, tell me: what should I have done with my power, and the knowledge Ogion tried to teach me?”
“Use it.”
“How?”
“As the Art Magic is used.”
“By whom?”
“Wizards,” he said, a little painfully.
“Magic means the skills, the arts of wizards, of mages?”
“What else would it mean?”
“Is that all it could ever mean?”
He pondered, glancing up at her once or twice.
“When Ogion taught me,” she said, “here—at the hearth there—the words of the Old Speech, they were as easy and as hard in my mouth as in his. That was like learning the language I spoke before I was born. But the rest—the lore, the runes of power, the spells, the rules, the raising of the forces—that was all dead to me. Somebody else’s language. I used to think, I could be dressed up as a warrior, with a lance and a sword and a plume and all, but it wouldn’t fit, would it? What would I do with the sword? Would it make me a hero? I’d be myself in clothes that didn’t fit, is all, hardly able to walk.”
She sipped her wine.
“So I took it all off,” she said, “and put on my own clothes.”
“What did Ogion say when you left him?”
“What did Ogion usually say?”
That roused the shadowy smile again. He said nothing.
She nodded.
After a while, she went on more softly, “He took me because you brought me to him. He wanted no prentice after you, and he never would have taken a girl but from you, at your asking. But he loved me. He did me honor. And I loved and honored him. But he couldn’t give me what I wanted, and I couldn’t take what he had to give me. He knew that. But, Ged, it was a different matter when he saw Therru. The day before he died. You say, and Moss says, that power knows power. I don’t know what he saw in her, but he said, ‘Teach her!’ And he said ...”
Ged waited.
“He said, ‘They will fear her.’ And he said, ‘Teach her all! Not Roke.’ I don’t know what he meant. How can I know? If I had stayed here with him I might know, I might be able to teach her. But I thought, Ged will come, he’ll know. He’ll know what to teach her, what she needs to know, my wronged one.”
“I do not know,” he said, speaking very low. “I saw—In the child I see only—the wrong done. The evil.”
He drank off his wine.
“I have nothing to give her,” he said.
There was a little scraping knock at the door. He started up instantly with that same helpless turn of the body, looking for a place to hide.
Tenar went to the door, opened it a crack, and smelled Moss before she saw her.
“Men in the village,” the old woman whispered dramatically. “All kind of fine folk come up from the Port, from the great ship that’s in from Havnor City, they say. Come after the Archmage, they say.”
“He doesn’t want to see them,” Tenar said weakly. She had no idea what to do.
“I dare say not,” said the witch. And after an expectant pause, “Where is he, then?”
“Here,” said Sparrowhawk, coming to the door and opening it wider. Moss eyed him and said nothing.
“Do they know where I am?”
“Not from me,” Moss said.
“If they come here,” said Tenar, “all you have to do is send them away—after all, you are the Archmage—”
Neither he nor Moss was paying attention to her.
“They won’t come to my house,” Moss said. “Come on, if you like.”
He followed her, with a glance but no word to Tenar.
“But what am I to tell them?” she demanded.
“Nothing, dearie,” said the witch.
Heather and Therru came back from the marshes with seven dead frogs in a net bag, and Tenar busied herself cutting off and skinning the legs for the hunters’ supper. She was just finishing when she heard voices outside, and looking up at the open door saw people standing at it—men in hats, a twist of gold, a glitter—“Mistress Goha?” said a civil voice. “Come in!” she said.
They came in: five men, seeming twice as many in the low-ceilinged room, and tall, and grand. They looked about them, and she saw what they saw.
They saw a woman standing at a table, holding a long, sharp knife. On the table was a chopping board and on that, to one side, a little heap of naked greenish-white legs; to the other, a heap of fat, bloody, dead frogs. In the shadow behind the door something lurked—a child, but a child deformed, mismade, half-faced, claw-handed. On a bed in an alcove beneath the single window sat a big, bony young woman, staring at them with her mouth wide open. Her hands were bloody and muddy and her dank skirt smelled of marsh-water. When she saw them look at her, she tried to hide her face with her skirt, baring her legs to the thigh.
They looked away from her, and from the child, and there was no one else to look at but the woman with the dead frogs.
“Mistress Goha,” one of them repeated.
“So I’m called,” she said.
“We come from Havnor, from the King,” said the civil voice. She could not see his face clearly against the light. “We seek the Archmage, Sparrowhawk of Gont. King Lebannen is to be crowned at the turn of autumn, and he seeks to have the Archmage, his lord and friend, with him to make ready for the coronation, and to crown him, if he will.”
The man spoke steadily and formally, as to a lady in a palace. He wore sober breeches of leather and a linen shirt dusty from the climb up from Gont Port, but it was fine cloth, with embroidery of gold thread at the throat.
“He’s not here,” Tenar said.
A couple of little boys from the village peered in at the door and drew back, peered again, fled shouting.
“Maybe you can tell us where he is, Mistress Goha,” said the man.
“I cannot.”
She looked at them all. The fear of them she had felt at first—caught from Sparrowhawk’s panic, perhaps, or mere foolish fluster at seeing strangers—was subsiding. Here she stood in Ogion’s house; and she knew well enough why Ogion had never been afraid of great people.
“You must be tired after that long road,” she said. “Will you sit down? There’s wine. Here, I must wash the glasses.”
She carried the chopping board over to the sideboard, put the frogs’ legs in the larder, scraped the rest into the swill-pail that Heather would carry to Weaver Fan’s pigs, washed her hands and arms and the knife at the basin, poured fresh water, and rinsed out the two glasses she and Sparrowhawk had drunk from. There was one other glass in the cabinet, and two clay cups without handles. She set these on the table, and poured wine for the visitors; there was just enough left in the bottle to go round. They had exchanged glances, and had not sat down. The shortage of chairs excused that. The rules of hospitality, however, bound them to accept what she offered. Each man took glass or cup from her with a polite murmur. Saluting her, they drank.
“My word!” said one of them.
“Andrades—the Late Harvest,” said an
A third shook his head. “Andrades—the Dragon Year,” he said solemnly.
The fourth nodded and sipped again, reverent.
The fifth, who was the first to have spoken, lifted his clay cup to Tenar again and said, “You honor us with a king’s wine, mistress.”
“It was Ogion’s,” she said. “This was Ogion’s house. This is Aihal’s house. You knew that, my lords?”
“We did, mistress. The king sent us to this house, believing that the archmage would come here; and, when word of the death of its master came to Roke and Havnor, yet more certain of it. But it was a dragon that bore the archmage from Roke. And no word or sending has come from him since then to Roke or to the king. And it is much in the king’s heart, and much in the interest of us all, to know the archmage is here, and is well. Did he come here, mistress?”
“I cannot say,” she said, but it was a poor equivocation, repeated, and she could see that the men thought so. She drew herself up, standing behind the table. “I mean that I will not say. I think if the archmage wishes to come, he will come. If he wishes not to be found, you will not find him. Surely you will not seek him out against his will.”
The oldest of the men, and the tallest, said, “The king’s will is ours.”
The first speaker said more conciliatingly, “We are only messengers. What is between the king and the archmage of the Isles is between them. We seek only to bring the message, and the reply.”
“If I can, I will see that your message reaches him.”
“And the reply?” the oldest man demanded.
She said nothing, and the first speaker said, “We’ll be here some few days at the house of the Lord of Re Albi, who, hearing of our ship’s arrival, offered us his hospitality.”
She felt a sense of a trap laid or a noose tightening, though she did not know why. Sparrowhawk’s vulnerability, his sense of his own weakness, had infected her. Distraught, she used the defense of her appearance, her seeming to be a mere goodwife, a middle-aged housekeeper—but was it seeming? It was also truth, and these matters were more subtle even than the guises and shape-changes of wizards.—She ducked her head and said, “That will be more befitting your lordships’ comfort. You see we live very plain here, as the old mage did.”