The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin
They had a cup of the warmed barley gruel the country people of Gont drink, a boiled egg, a peach; they ate by the hearth, for the morning air in the shadow of the mountain was too cold for sitting outdoors. Sparrowhawk looked after his livestock: fed the chickens, scattered grain for doves, let the goats into the pasture. When he came back they sat again on the bench in the dooryard. The sun was not over the mountain yet, but the air had grown dry and warm.
“Now tell me what brings you here, Alder. But since you came by Roke, tell me first if things are well in the Great House.”
“I did not enter it, my lord.”
“Ah.” A neutral tone but a sharp glance.
“I was only in the Immanent Grove.”
“Ah.” A neutral tone, a neutral glance. “Is the Patterner well?”
“He told me, ‘Carry my love and honor to my lord and say to him: I wish we walked in the Grove together as we used to do.’“
Sparrowhawk smiled a little sadly. After a while he said, “So. But he sent you to me with more to say than that, I think.”
“I will try to be brief.”
“Man, we have all day before us. And I like a story told from the beginning.”
So Alder told him his story from the beginning.
He was a witch’s son, born in the town of Elini on Taon, the Isle of the Harpers.
Taon is at the southern end of the Sea of Ea, not far from where Solea lay before the sea whelmed it. That was the ancient heart of Earthsea. All those islands had states and cities, kings and wizards, when Havnor was a land of feuding tribesmen and Gont a wilderness ruled by bears. People born on Ea or Ebea, Enlad or Taon, though they may be a ditchdigger’s daughter or a witch’s son, consider themselves to be descendants of the Elder Mages, sharing the lineage of the warriors who died in the dark years for Queen Elfarran. Therefore they often have a fine courtesy of manner, though sometimes an undue haughtiness, and a generous, uncalculating turn of mind and speech, a way of soaring above mere fact and prose, which those whose minds stay close to merchandise distrust. “Kites without strings,” say the rich men of Havnor of such people. But they do not say it in the hearing of the king, Lebannen of the House of Enlad.
The best harps in Earthsea are made on Taon, and there are schools of music there, and many famous singers of the Lays and Deeds were born or learned their art there. Elini, however, is just a market town in the hills, with no music about it, Alder said; and his mother was a poor woman, though not, as he put it, hungry poor. She had a birthmark, a red stain from the right eyebrow and ear clear down over her shoulder. Many women and men with such a blemish or difference about them become witches or sorcerers perforce, “marked for it,” people say. Blackberry learned spells and could do the most ordinary kind of witchery; she had no real gift for it, but she had a way about her that was almost as good as the gift itself. She made a living, and trained her son as well as she could, and saved enough to prentice him to the sorcerer who gave him his true name.
Of his father Alder said nothing. He knew nothing. Blackberry had never spoken of him. Though seldom celibate, witches seldom kept company more than a night or two with any man, and it was a rare thing for a witch to marry a man. Far more often two of them lived their lives together, and that was called witch marriage or she-troth. A witch’s child, then, had a mother or two mothers, but no father. That went without saying, and Sparrowhawk asked nothing on that score; but he asked about Alder’s training.
The sorcerer Gannet had taught Alder the few words he knew of the True Speech, and some spells of finding and illusion, at which Alder had shown, he said, no talent at all. But Gannet took enough interest in the boy to discover his true gift. Alder was a mender. He could rejoin. He could make whole. A broken tool, a knife blade or an axle snapped, a pottery bowl shattered: he could bring the fragments back together without joint or seam or weakness. So his master sent him about seeking various spells of mending, which he found mostly among witches of the island, and he worked with them and by himself to learn to mend.
“That is a kind of healing,” Sparrowhawk said. “No small gift, nor easy craft.”
“It was a joy to me,” Alder said, with a shadow of a smile in his face. “Working out the spells, and finding sometimes how to use one of the True Words in the work… To put back together a barrel that’s dried, the staves all fallen in from the hoops—that’s a real pleasure, seeing it build up again, and swell out in the right curve, and stand there on its bottom ready for the wine…There was a harper from Meoni, a great harper, oh, he played like a storm on the high hills, like a tempest on the sea. He was hard on the harp strings, twanging and pulling them in the passion of his art, so they’d break at the very height and flight of the music. And so he hired me to be there near him when he played, and when he broke a string I’d mend it quick as the note itself, and he’d play on.”
Sparrowhawk nodded with the warmth of a fellow professional talking shop. “Have you mended glass?” he asked.
“I have, but it’s a long, nasty job,” Alder said, “with all the tiny little bits and speckles glass goes to.”
“But a big hole in the heel of a stocking can be worse,” Sparrowhawk said, and they discussed mending for a while longer, before Alder returned to his story.
He had become a mender, then, a sorcerer with a modest practice and a local reputation for his gift. When he was about thirty, he went to the principal city of the island, Meoni, with the harper, who was playing for a wedding there. A woman sought him out in their lodging, a young woman, not trained as a witch; but she had a gift, she said, the same as his, and wanted him to teach her. And indeed she had a greater gift than his. Though she knew not a word of the Old Speech, she could put a smashed jug back together or mend a frayed-out rope just with the movements of her hands and a wordless song she sang under her breath, and she had healed broken limbs of animals and people, which Alder had never dared try to do.
So rather than his teaching her, they put their skills together and taught each other more than either had ever known. She came back to Elini and lived with Alder’s mother Blackberry, who taught her various useful appearances and effects and ways of impressing customers, if not much actual witch knowledge. Lily was her name; and Lily and Alder worked together there and in all the hill towns nearby, as their reputation grew.
“And I came to love her,” Alder said. His voice had changed when he began to speak of her, losing its hesitancy, growing urgent and musical.
“Her hair was dark, but with a shining of red gold in it,” he said.
There was no way he could hide his love from her, and she knew it and returned it. Whether she was a witch now or not, she said she did not care; she said the two of them were born to be together, in their work and in their life; she loved him and would be married to him.
So they were married, and lived in very great happiness for a year, and half a second year.
“Nothing was wrong at all until the time came for the child to be born,” Alder said. “But it was late, and then very late. The midwives tried to bring on the birth with herbs and spells, but it was as if the child would not let her bear it. It would not be separated from her. It would not be born. And it was not born. It took her with it.”
After a while he said, “We had great joy.”
“I see that.”
“And my sorrow was in that degree.”
The old man nodded.
“I could bear it,” Alder said. “You know how it is. There was not much reason to be living that I could see, but I could bear it.”
“Yes.”
“But in the winter. Two months after her death. There was a dream came to me. She was in the dream.”
‘Tell it.
“I stood on a hillside. Along the top of the hill and running down the slope was a wall, low, like a boundary wall between sheep pastures. She was standing across the wall from me, below it. It was darker there.”
Sparrowhawk nodded once. His face had gone rock har
“She was calling to me. I heard her voice saying my name, and I went to her. I knew she was dead, I knew it in the dream, but I was glad to go. I couldn’t see her clear, and I went to her to see her, to be with her. And she reached out across the wall. It was no higher than my heart. I had thought she might have the child with her, but she did not. She was reaching her hands out to me, and so I reached out to her, and we took each others hands.”
“You touched?”
“I wanted to go to her, but I could not cross the wall. My legs would not move. I tried to draw her to me, and she wanted to come, it seemed as if she could, but the wall was there between us. We couldn’t get over it. So she leaned across to me and kissed my mouth and said my name. And she said, ‘Set me free!’
“I thought if I called her by her true name maybe I could free her, bring her across that wall, and I said, ‘Come with me, Mevre!’ But she said, ‘That’s not my name, Hara, that’s not my name any more.’ And she let go my hands, though I tried to hold her. She cried, ‘Set me free, Hara!’ But she was going down into the dark. It was all dark down that hillside below the wall. I called her name and her use-name and all the dear names I had had for her, but she went on away. So then I woke.”
Sparrowhawk gazed long and keenly at his visitor. “You gave me your name, Hara,” he said.
Alder looked a little stunned, and took a couple of long breaths, but he looked up with desolate courage. “Who could I better trust it with?” he said.
Sparrowhawk thanked him gravely. “I will try to deserve your trust,” he said. “Tell me, do you know what that place is—that wall?”
“I did not know it then. Now I know you have crossed it.”
“Yes. I’ve been on that hill. And crossed the wall, by the power and art I used to have. And I’ve gone down to the cities of the dead, and spoken to men I had known living, and sometimes they answered me. But Hara, you are the first man I ever knew or heard of, among all the great mages in the lore of Roke or Paln or the Enlades, who ever touched, ho ever kissed his love across that wall.”
Alder sat with his head bowed and his hands clenched.
“Will you tell me: what was her touch like? Were her hands warm? Was she cold air and shadow, or like a living woman? Forgive my questions.”
“I wish I could answer them, my lord. On Roke the summoner asked the same. But I can’t answer truly. My longing for her was so great, I wished so much—it could be I wished her to be as she was in life. But I don’t know. In dream not all things are clear.”
“In dream, no. But I never heard of any man coming to the wall in dream. It is a place a wizard may seek to come to, if he must, if he’s learned the way and has the power. But without the knowledge and the power, only the dying can—”
And then he broke off, remembering his dream of the night before.
“I took it for a dream,” Alder said. “It troubled me, but I cherished it. It was like a harrow on my heart’s ground to think of it, and yet I held to that pain, held it close to me. I wanted it. I hoped to dream again.”
“Did you?”
“Yes. I dreamed again.”
He looked unseeing into the blue gulf of air and ocean west of where they sat. Low and faint across the tranquil sea lay the sunlit hills of Kameber. Behind them the sun was breaking bright over the mountains northern shoulder.
“It was nine days after the first dream. I was in that same place, but high up on the hill. I saw the wall below me across the slope. And I ran down the hill, calling out her name, sure of seeing her. There was someone there. But when I came close, I saw it wasn’t Lily. It was a man, and he was stooping at the wall, as if he was repairing it. I said to him, ‘Where is she, where is Lily?’ He didn’t answer or look up. I saw what he was doing. He wasn’t working to mend the wall but to unbuild it, prying with his fingers at a great stone. The stone never moved, and he said, ‘Help me, Hara!’ Then I saw that it was my teacher, Gannet, who named me. He has been dead these five years. He kept prying and straining at the stone with his fingers, and said my name again—’Help me, set me free.’ And he stood up and reached out to me across the wall, as she had done, and caught my hand. But his hand burned, with fire or with cold, I don’t know, but the touch of it burned me so that I pulled away, and the pain and fear of it woke me from the dream.”
He held his hand out as he spoke, showing a darkness on the back and palm like an old bruise.
“I’ve learned not to let them touch me,” he said in a low voice.
Ged looked at Alder’s mouth. There was a darkening across his lips too.
“Hara, you’ve been in mortal danger,” he said, also softly.
“There is more.”
Forcing his voice against silence, Alder went on with his story.
The next night when he slept again he found himself on that dim hill and saw the wall that dropped down from the hilltop across the slope. He went down towards it, hoping to find his wife there. “I didn’t care if she couldn’t cross it, if I couldn’t, so long as I could see her and talk to her,” he said. But if she was there he never saw her among all the others: for as he came closer to the wall he saw a crowd of shadowy people on the other side, some clear and some dim, some he seemed to know and others he did not know, and all of them reached out their hands to him as he approached and called him by his name: “Hara! let us come with you! Hara, set us free!”
“It’s a terrible thing to hear one’s true name called by strangers,” Alder said, “and it’s a terrible thing to be called by the dead.”
He tried to turn and climb back up the hill, away from the wall; but his legs had the awful weakness of dream and would not carry him. He fell to his knees to keep himself from being drawn down to the wall, and called out for help, though there was no one to help him; and so he woke in terror.
Since then, every night that he slept deeply, he found himself standing on the hill in the dry grey grass above the wall, and the dead would crowd thick and shadowy below it, pleading and crying to him, calling his name.
“I wake,” he said, “and I’m in my own room. I’m not there, on that hillside. But I know they are. And I have to sleep. I try to wake often, and to sleep in daylight when I can, but I have to sleep at last. And then I am there, and they are there. And I can’t go up the hill. If I move it’s always downhill, towards the wall. Sometimes I can turn my back to them, but then I think I hear Lily among them, crying to me. And I turn to look for her. And they reach out to me.”
He looked down at his hands gripping each other.
“What am I to do?” he said.
Sparrowhawk said nothing.
After a long time Alder said, “The harper I told you of was a good friend to me. After a while he saw there was something amiss, and when I told him that I couldn’t sleep for fear of my dreams of the dead, he urged me arid helped me to take ship’s passage to Ea, to speak to a grey wizard there.” He meant a man trained in the School on Roke. “As soon as that wizard heard what my dreams were he said I must go to Roke.”
“What is his name?”
“Beryl. He serves the Prince of Ea, who is Lord of the Isle of Taon.”
The old man nodded.
“He had no help to give me, he said, but his word was as good as gold to the ship’s master. So I went on the water again. That was a long journey, coasting clear round Havnor and down the Inmost Sea. I thought maybe being on the water, far from Taon, always farther, I might leave the dream behind me. The wizard on Ea called that place in my dream the dry land, and I thought maybe I’d be going away from it, going on the sea. But every night I was there on the hillside. And more than once in the night, as time went on. Twice, or three times, or every time my eyes close, I’m on the hill, and the wall below me, and the voices calling me. So I’m like a man crazy with the pain of a wound who can find peace only in sleep, but the sleep is my torment, with the pain and anguish of the wretched dead all crowding at the wall, and my fear of them.”
“And no relief for you on Roke?”
“In the Grove,” Alder said, and his face changed entirely when he said the word.
Sparrowhawk’s face had the same look for a moment.
“The Master Patterner took me there, under those trees, and I could sleep. Even at night I could sleep. In daylight, if the sun’s on me—it was like that in the afternoon, yesterday, here—if the warmth of the sun’s on me and the red of the sun shines through my eyelids, I don’t fear to dream. But in the Grove there was no fear at all, and I could love the night again.”
“Tell me how it was when you came to Roke.”
Though hampered by weariness, anguish, and awe, Alder had the silver tongue of his island; and what he left out for fear of going on too long or telling the Archmage what he already knew, his listener could well imagine, remembering when he himself first came to the Isle of the Wise as a boy of fifteen.
When Alder left the ship at the docks at Thwil Town, one of the sailors had drawn the rune of the Closed Door on the top of the gangplank to prevent his ever coming back aboard. Alder noticed it, but he thought the sailor had good cause. He felt himself ill-omened; he felt he bore darkness in him. That made him shyer than he would have been in any case in a strange town. And Thwil was a very strange town.
“The streets lead you awry,” Sparrowhawk said.
“They do that, my lord!—I’m sorry, my tongue will obey my heart, and not you—”
“Never mind. I was used to it once. I can be Lord Goatherd again, if it eases your speech. Go on.”
Misdirected by those he asked, or misunderstanding the directions, Alder wandered about the hilly little labyrinth of Thwil Town with the School always in sight and never able to get to it, until, having reached despair, he came to a plain door in a bare wall on a dull square. After staring at it a while he recognised the wall was the one he had been trying to get to. He knocked, and a man with a quiet face and quiet eyes opened the door.