The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin
Tenar hesitated a while. “She is his daughter, after all.”
“What’s a daughter to a barbarian king? Goods. A bargaining piece to buy advantage with. You know that! You were born there!”
It was unlike him to speak so, and he heard it himself. He knelt down suddenly, catching her hand and putting it over his eyes in sign of contrition. “Tenar, I’m sorry. This disturbs me beyond all reason. I can’t see what to do.”
“Well, so long as you do nothing, you have some leeway… Maybe the princess has some opinion of her own?”
“How can she? Hidden in that red sack? She won’t talk, she won’t look out, she might as well be a tent pole.” He tried to laugh. His own uncontrollable resentment alarmed him and he tried to excuse it. “This came on just as I had troubling news from the west. It was for that that I asked you and Tehanu to come. Not to bother you with this foolishness.”
“It isn’t foolishness,” Tenar said, but he brushed the topic away, dismissed it, and began to talk about dragons.
Since the news from the west had been troubling indeed, he had succeeded in not thinking about the princess at all, most of the time. He was aware that it was not his habit to handle matters of state by ignoring them. Manipulated, one manipulates others. Several days after their conversation, he asked Tenar to visit the princess, to try to get her to talk. After all, he said, they spoke the same language.
“Probably,” Tenar said. “I never knew anybody from Hur-at-Hur. On Atuan, we called them barbarians.”
He was chastised. But of course she did what he asked. Presently she reported that she and the princess spoke the same language, or nearly the same, and that the princess had not known that there were any other languages. She had thought all the people here, the courtiers and ladies, were malicious lunatics, mocking her by chattering and yapping like animals without human speech. As well as Tenar could tell, she had grown up in the desert, in King Thol’s original domain on Hur-at-Hur, and had only been very briefly at the imperial court in Awabath before she was sent on to Havnor.
“She’s frightened,” Tenar said.
“So she hides in her tent. What does she think I am?”
“How could she know what you are?”
He scowled. “How old is she?”
“Young. But a woman.”
“I can’t marry her,” he said, with sudden resolution. “I’ll send her back.”
“A returned bride is a dishonored woman. If you send her back, Thol might kill her to keep the dishonor from his house. He’ll certainly consider that you intend to dishonor him.”
The look of fury came into his face again.
Tenar forestalled him. “Barbarian customs,” she said stiffly.
He strode up and down the room. “Very well. But I will not consider this girl as queen of the Kingdom of Morred. Can she be taught to speak Hardic? A few words, at least? Is she unteachable? I’ll tell Thol that a Hardic king can’t marry a woman who doesn’t speak the language of the realm. I don’t care if he doesn’t like it, he needs the slap. And it buys me time.”
“And you’ll ask her to learn Hardic?”
“How can I ask her anything if she takes it all for gibberish? What possible use is there in my going to her? I thought perhaps you’d speak to her, Tenar… You must see what an imposition this is, using this girl to make Thol appear my equal, using the Ring—the Ring you brought us—as a trap! I cannot even seem to condone it. I’m willing to temporise, to delay, in order to keep the peace. Nothing more. Even that much deceit is vile. Tell the girl what you think best. I will have nothing to do with her.”
And he went out in a righteous wrath, which cooled slowly into an uneasy feeling much resembling shame.
When the Kargish emissaries announced they would be leaving soon, Lebannen prepared a carefully worded message for King Thol. He expressed his appreciation of the honor of the princess’s presence in Havnor and the pleasure he and his court would have in introducing her to the manners, customs, and language of his kingdom. He said nothing at all about the Ring, about marrying her, or about not marrying her.
It was in the evening after his conversation with the dream-troubled sorcerer from Taon that he met for the last time with the Kargs and gave them his letter to the High King. He read it aloud first, as the ambassador had read aloud Thol’s letter to him.
The ambassador listened complacently. “The High King will be pleased,” he said.
All the time he was talking amenities to the emissaries and displaying the gifts he was sending to Thol, Lebannen puzzled over this easy acceptance of his evasiveness. His thoughts all came to one conclusion: He knows I’m stuck with her. To which his mind made a passionate silent answer: Never.
He inquired whether the ambassador would be going by the River House to bid his princess farewell. The ambassador looked at him blankly, as if he had been asked if he was going to say goodbye to a package he had delivered. Lebannen felt the anger rising in his heart again. He saw the ambassador’s face change a little, taking on a wary, placating look. He smiled and wished the emissaries a fair wind to the Kargad Lands. He went out of the audience chamber and to his own room.
Rites and ceremony hedged most of his acts, and as king he must be in public most of his life; but because he had come to a throne empty for centuries, a palace where there were no protocols, he had been able to have some things as he liked them. He had kept ceremony out of his bedroom. His nights were his own. He said good night to Oak, who would sleep in the anteroom, and shut the door. He sat down on his bed. He felt tired and angry and strangely desolate.
Around his neck he always wore a slight gold chain with a little pouch of cloth-of-gold on it. In the pouch was a pebble: a dull, black bit of rock, rough edged. He took it out and held it in his hand as he sat and thought.
He tried to turn his mind away from all this stupidity about the Kargish girl by thinking about the sorcerer Alder and his dreams. But all that came into his mind was a painful envy of Alder for having gone ashore on Gont, having talked with Ged, having stayed with him.
That was why he felt desolate. The man he called his lord, the man he had loved above all others, wouldn’t let him come near, wouldn’t come to him.
Did Ged believe that because he had lost his wizardly power, Lebannen must think less of him? must despise him?
Given the power that power had over the minds and hearts of men, it was not an implausible thought. But surely Ged knew him better, or at least thought better of him.
Was it that, having been truly Lebannen’s lord and guide, Ged could not bear to be his subject? That might indeed be hard for the old man to bear: the blunt, irrevocable reversal of their status.
But Lebannen remembered very clearly how Ged had knelt to him, down on both knees, on Roke Knoll, in the shadow of the dragon and in the sight of the masters whose master Ged had been. He had stood up and kissed Lebannen, telling him to rule well, calling him my lord and dear companion.
“He gave me my kingdom,” Lebannen had said to Alder. That had been the moment he gave it. Wholly, freely.
And that was why Ged wouldn’t come to Havnor, wouldn’t let Lebannen come to take counsel with him. He had handed over the power—wholly, freely. He would not even seem to meddle, to cast his shadow across Lebannen’s light.
“He has done with doing,” the Doorkeeper had said.
But Alder’s story had moved Ged to send the man here, to Lebannen, asking him to act as need required.
It was indeed strange, Alders story; and Ged’s saying that maybe the wall itself was going to fall was stranger yet. What could it mean? And why should one man’s dreams bear so much weight?
He himself had dreamed of the outskirts of the dryland, long ago, when he and Ged the Archmage were traveling together, before they ever came to Selidor.
And on that westernmost of all the islands he had followed Ged into the dry land. Across the wall of stones, awn to dim cities where the shadows of the dead stood in doorways or
He opened his palm, looked down at the little black stone he held, closed his hand on it again.
From the valley of the dry river, having done what they came to do, they had climbed up into the mountains, because there was no turning back. They had gone up the road forbidden to the dead, climbing, clambering over rocks that scored and burned their hands, till Ged could go no farther. Lebannen had carried him as far as he could, then crawled on with him to the end of darkness, the hopeless cliff of night. And so had come back, with him, into the sunlight and the sound of the sea breaking on the shores of life.
It was a long time since he had thought so vividly of that terrible journey. But the bit of black stone from those mountains was always over his heart.
And it seemed to him now that the memory of that land, the darkness of it, the dust, was always in his mind just under the bright various play and movement of the days, although he always looked away from it. He looked away because he could not bear the knowledge that in the end that was where he would come again: come alone, uncompanioned, and forever. To stand empty-eyed, unspeaking, in the shadows of a shadow city. Never to see sunlight, or drink water, or touch a living hand.
He got up abruptly, shaking off these morbid thoughts.
He closed the stone in its pouch, made ready for bed, put out the lamp, and lay down. At once he saw it again: the dim grey land of dust and rock It rose up far ahead into black, sharp peaks, but here it sloped away, always downward, to the right, into utter darkness. “What lies that way?” he had asked Ged as they walked on and on. His companion had said he did not know, that maybe that way there was no end. Lebannen sat up, angered and alarmed by the relentless drift of his thought. His eyes sought the window. It looked north. He liked the view from Havnor across the hills to the tall, grey-headed mountain Onn. Farther north, unseen, across all the width of the Great Island and the Sea of Ea, was Enlad, his home.
Lying in bed he could see only the sky, a clear summer night sky, the Heart of the Swan riding high among lesser stars. His kingdom. The kingdom of light, of life, where the stars blossomed like white flowers in the east and drooped in their brightness to the west. He would not think of that other realm where the stars stayed still, where there was no power in a man’s hand, and no right way to go because no way led anywhere.
Lying gazing at the stars, he turned his mind deliberately from those memories and from the thought of Ged. He thought of Tenar: the sound of her voice, the touch of her hand. Courtiers were ceremonious, cautious about how and when they touched the king. She was not. She laid her hand on his, laughing. She was bolder with him than his mother had been.
Rose, princess of the House of Enlad, had died of a fever two years ago, while he was on shipboard coming to make a royal visit to Berila on Enlad and the isles south of it. He had not known of her death till he came home to a city and a house in mourning.
His mother was there now in the dark country, the dry country. If he came there and passed her in the street she would not look at him. She would not speak to him.
He clenched his hands. He rearranged the cushions of his bed, tried to make himself easy, tried to set his mind away from there, to think of things that would keep him from going back there. To think of his mother living, her voice, her dark eyes under dark arched brows, her delicate hands.
Or to think of Tenar. He knew he had asked Tenar to come to Havnor not only to take counsel from her but because she was the mother that remained to him. He wanted that love, to give it and be given it. The ruthless love that makes no allowances, no conditions. Tenar’s eyes were grey, not dark, but she looked right through him with a piercing tenderness undeceived by anything he said or did.
He knew he did well what he had been called to do. He knew he was good at playing king. But only with his mother and with Tenar had he ever known beyond any self-doubt what it was to be king.
Tenar had known him since he was a very young man, not yet crowned. She had loved him then and ever since, for his sake, for Ged’s sake, and for her own. He was to her the son who never breaks your heart.
But she thought he might yet manage to, if he kept on being so rageful and dishonest about this poor girl from Hur-at-Hur.
She attended the final audience of the emissaries from Awabath. Lebannen had asked her to be there, and she was glad to come. Finding Kargs at the court when she came there at the beginning of summer, she had expected them to shun her or at least to eye her askance: the renegade priestess who with the thieving Hawk Mage had stolen the Ring of Erreth-Akbe from the treasury of the Tombs of Atuan and traitorously fled with it to Havnor. It was her doing that the Archipelago had a king again. The Kargs might well hold it against her.
And Thol of Hur-at-Hur had restored the worship of the Twin Gods and the Nameless Ones, whose greatest temple Tenar had despoiled. Her treason had been not only political but religious.
Yet that was long ago, forty years and more, almost the stuff of legend; and statesmen remember things selectively. Thol’s ambassador had begged the honor of an audience with her and had greeted her with elaborately pious respect, some of which she thought was real. He called her Lady Arha, the Eaten One, the One Ever Reborn. She had not been called by those names for years, and they sounded very strange to her. But it gave her a keen, rueful pleasure to hear her native tongue and to find she could still speak it.
So she came to bid the ambassador and his company goodbye. She asked him to assure the High King of the Kargs that his daughter was well, and she looked admiringly a last time at the tall, rawboned men with their pale, braided hair, their plumed headdresses, their court armor of silver mesh interwoven with feathers. When she lived in the Kargad Lands she had seen few men of her own race. Only women and eunuchs had lived at the Place of the Tombs.
After the ceremony she escaped into the gardens of the palace. The summer night was warm and restless, flowering shrubs of the gardens stirring in the night wind. The sounds of the city outside the palace walls were like the murmur of a quiet sea. A couple of young courtiers were walking entwined under the arbors; not to disturb them, Tenar walked among the fountains and the roses at the other end of the garden.
Lebannen had left the audience scowling again. What was wrong with him? So far as she knew, he had never before rebelled against the obligations of his position. Certainly he knew that a king must marry and has little real choice as to whom he marries. He knew that a king who does not obey his people is a tyrant. He knew his people wanted a queen, wanted heirs to the throne. But he had done nothing about it. Women of the court had been happy to gossip to Tenar about his several mistresses, none of whom had lost anything by being known as the king’s lover. He had certainly managed all that quite well, but he couldn’t expect to do so forever. Why was he so enraged by King Thol’s offering him a perfectly appropriate solution?
Imperfectly appropriate, perhaps. The princess was something of a problem.
Tenar was going to have to try to teach the girl Hardic. And to find ladies willing to instruct her in the manners of the Archipelago and the etiquette of the court—something she certainly wasn’t capable of herself. She had more sympathy with the princess’s ignorance than with the courtiers’ sophistication.
She resented Lebannen’s failure or inability to take the girl’s point of view. Couldn’t he imagine what it was like for her? Brought up in the women’s quarters of a warlord’s fortress in a remote desert land, where she probably had never seen any man but her father and uncles and some priests; suddenly carried off from that changeless poverty and rigidity of life, by strangers, on a long and frightening sea voyage; abandoned among people whom she knew of only as irreligious and bloodthirsty monsters who dwelt on the far edge of the world, not truly human at all because they were wizards who could turn into ani
Tenar had been able to leave her own people and come to live among the monsters and wizards of the West because she had been with Ged, whom she loved and trusted. Even so it had not been easy; often her courage had failed. For all the welcome the people of Havnor had given her, the crowds and cheering and flowers and praise, the sweet names they called her, the White Lady, the Peace Bringer, Tenar of the Ring—for all that, she had cowered in her room in the palace those nights long ago, in misery because she was so lonely, and nobody spoke her language, and she didn’t know any of the things they all knew. As soon as the rejoicings were over and the Ring was in its place she had begged Ged to take her away, and he had kept his promise, slipping away with her to Gont. There she had lived in the Old Mage’s house as Ogion’s ward and pupil, learning how to be an Archipelagan, till she saw the way she wanted to follow for herself as a woman grown.
She had been younger than this girl when she came to Havnor with the Ring. But she had not grown up powerless, as the princess had. Though her power as the One Priestess had been mostly ceremonial, nominal, she had taken real control of her fate when she broke with the grim ways of her upbringing and won freedom for her prisoner and herself. But the daughter of a warlord would have control over only trivial things. When her father made himself king she would be called princess, she would be given richer clothing, more slaves, more eunuchs, more jewelry, until she herself was given in marriage; but she would have no say in any of it. All she ever saw of the world outside the women’s quarters would be through window slits in thick walls, through layers of red veiling.
Tenar counted herself lucky not to have been born on so backward and barbaric an island as Hur-at-Hur, never to have worn the feyag. But she knew what it was to grow up in the grip of an iron tradition. It behooved her to do what she could to help the princess, so long as she was in Havnor. But she didn’t intend to stay here long.