Tales From Earthsea (38 page)

The last novella, “Dragonfly,” is the direct bridge between
Tehanu
and the final novel. Its final events follow after the end of
Tehanu
and come before
The Other Wind.
Everything I’d been learning about the relationship of people and dragons begins to come clear in this story, along with the understanding of what had gone wrong on Roke. I was beginning to hear the great final themes of the whole story of Earthsea. It was beginning to come right.

In the original foreword, I said,

In the years since I began to write about Earthsea I’ve changed, of course, and so have the people who read the books. All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.

It’s unsettling. For all our delight in the impermanent, the entrancing flicker of electronics, we also long for the unalterable. We cherish the old stories for their changelessness. Arthur dreams eternally in Avalon. Bilbo can go “there and back again,” and “there” is always the beloved familiar Shire. Don Quixote sets out forever to kill a windmill . . .

We may, I said, turn to fantasy seeking stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities; but the realms of Once-upon-a-time are unstable, mutable, complex, and as much a part of human history and thought as the nations in our ever-changing atlases. And in daily life or in imagination, we don’t live as our parents or ancestors did. “Enchantment alters with age, and with the age. We know a dozen different Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo’s lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there.”

To this I add: As the virtual world of electronic communication becomes the world many of us inhabit all the time, in turning to imaginative literature we may not be seeking mere reassurance nor be impelled by mere nostalgia. To enter with heart and mind into the world of the imagination may be to head deliberately and directly toward, or back toward, engagement with the real world.

In one of T. S. Eliot’s poems a bird sings, “Mankind cannot bear very much reality.” I’ve always thought that bird was mistaken, or was talking only about some people. I find it amazing how much of the real world most of us can endure. Not only endure, but need, desire, crave. Reality is life. Where we suffocate is in the half-life of unreality, untruth, imitation, fakery, the almost-true that is not true. To be human is to live both within and beyond the narrow band of what-happens-now, in the vast regions of the past and the possible, the known and the imagined: our real world, our true Now.

T
URN THE PAGE FOR A SNEAK PEEK AT
T
HE
O
THER
W
IND, THE NEXT ADVENTURE IN
T
HE
C
YCLE BY
U
RSULA
K. L
E
G
UIN
!

S
AILS LONG AND WHITE AS
swan’s wings carried the ship
Farflyer
through summer air down the bay from the Armed Cliffs toward Gont Port. She glided into the still water landward of the jetty, so sure and graceful a creature of the wind that a couple of townsmen fishing off the old quay cheered her in, waving to the crewmen and the one passenger standing in the prow.

He was a thin man with a thin pack and an old black cloak, probably a sorcerer or small tradesman, nobody important. The two fishermen watched the bustle on the dock and the ship’s deck as she made ready to unload her cargo, and only glanced at the passenger with a bit of curiosity when as he left the ship one of the sailors made a gesture behind his back, thumb and first and last finger of the left hand all pointed at him:
May you never come back!

He hesitated on the pier, shouldered his pack, and set off into the streets of Gont Port. They were busy streets, and he got at once into the Fish Market, abrawl with hawkers and hagglers, paving stones glittering with fish scales and brine. If he had a way, he soon lost it among the carts and stalls and crowds and the cold stares of dead fish.

A tall old woman turned from the stall where she had been insulting the freshness of the herring and the veracity of the fishwife. Seeing her glaring at him, the stranger said unwisely, “Would you have the kindness to tell me the way I should go for Re Albi?”

“Why, go drown yourself in pig slop for a start,” said the tall woman and strode off, leaving the stranger wilted and dismayed. But the fishwife, seeing a chance to seize the high moral ground, blared out, “Re Albi is it? Re Albi you want, man? Speak up then! The Old Mage’s house, that would be what you’d want at Re Albi. Yes it would. So you go out by the corner there, and up Elvers Lane there, see, till you reach the tower . . .”

Once he was out of the market, broad streets led him uphill and past the massive watchtower to a town gate. Two stone dragons large as life guarded it, teeth the length of his forearm, stone eyes glaring blindly out over the town and the bay. A lounging guard told him just turn left at the top of the road and he’d be in Re Albi. “And keep on through the village for the Old Mage’s house,” the guard said.

So he went trudging up the road, which was pretty steep, looking up as he went to the steeper slopes and far peak of Gont Mountain that overhung its island like a cloud.

It was a long road and a hot day. He soon had his black cloak off and went on bareheaded in his shirtsleeves, but he had not thought to find water or buy food in the town, or had been too shy to, maybe, for he was not a man familiar with cities or at ease with strangers.

After several long miles he caught up to a cart which he had seen far up the dusty way for a long time as a dark blot in a white blot of dust. It creaked and screaked along at the pace of a pair of small oxen that looked as old, wrinkled, and unhopeful as tortoises. He greeted the carter, who resembled the oxen. The carter said nothing, but blinked.

“Might there be a spring of water up the road?” the stranger asked.

The carter slowly shook his head. After a long time he said, “No.” A while later he said, “There ain’t.”

They all plodded along. Discouraged, the stranger found it hard to go any faster than the oxen, about a mile an hour, maybe.

He became aware that the carter was wordlessly reaching something out to him: a big clay jug wrapped round with wicker. He took it, and finding it very heavy, drank his fill of the water, leaving it scarcely lighter when he passed it back with his thanks.

“Climb on,” said the carter after a while.

“Thanks. I’ll walk. How far might it be to Re Albi?”

The wheels creaked. The oxen heaved deep sighs, first one, then the other. Their dusty hides smelled sweet in the hot sunlight.

“Ten mile,” the carter said. He thought, and said, “Or twelve.” After a while he said, “No less.”

“I’d better walk on, then,” said the stranger.

Refreshed by the water, he was able to get ahead of the oxen, and they and the cart and the carter were a good way behind him when he heard the carter speak again. “Going to the Old Mage’s house,” he said. If it was a question, it seemed to need no answer. The traveler walked on.

When he started up the road it had still lain in the vast shadow of the mountain, but when he turned left to the little village he took to be Re Albi, the sun was blazing in the western sky and under it the sea lay white as steel.

There were scattered small houses, a small dusty square, a fountain with one thin stream of water falling. He made for that, drank from his hands again and again, put his head under the stream, rubbed cool water through his hair and let it run down his arms, and sat for a while on the stone rim of the fountain, observed in attentive silence by two dirty little boys and a dirty little girl.

“He ain’t the farrier,” one of the boys said.

The traveler combed his wet hair back with his fingers.

“He’ll be going to the Old Mage’s house,” said the girl, “stupid.”

“Yerraghh!” said the boy, drawing his face into a horrible lopsided grimace by pulling at it with one hand while he clawed the air with the other.

“You watch it, Stony,” said the other boy.

“Take you there,” said the girl to the traveler.

“Thanks,” he said, and stood up wearily.

“Got no staff, see,” said one boy, and the other said, “Never said he did.” Both watched with sullen eyes as the stranger followed the girl out of the village to a path that led north through rocky pastures that dropped down steep to the left.

The sun glared on the sea. His eyes dazzled, and the high horizon and the blowing wind made him dizzy. The child was a little hopping shadow ahead of him. He stopped.

“Come on,” she said, but she too stopped. He came up to her on the path. “There,” she said. He saw a wooden house near the cliff’s edge, still some way ahead.

“I ain’t afraid,” the girl said. “I fetch their eggs lots of times for Stony’s dad to carry to market. Once she gave me peaches. The old lady. Stony says I stole ’em but I never. Go on. She ain’t there. Neither of ’em is.”

She stood still, pointing to the house.

“Nobody’s there?”

“The old man is. Old Hawk, he is.”

The traveler went on. The child stood watching him till he went round the corner of the house.

***

T
WO GOATS STARED DOWN AT
the stranger from a steep fenced field. A scatter of hens and half-grown chicks pecked and conversed softly in long grass under peach and plum trees. A man was standing on a short ladder against the trunk of one of the trees; his head was in the leaves, and the traveler could see only his bare brown legs.

“Hello,” the traveler said, and after a while said it again a bit louder.

The leaves shook and the man came briskly down the ladder. He carried a handful of plums, and when he got off the ladder he batted away a couple of bees drawn by the juice. He came forward, a short, straight-backed man, grey hair tied back from a handsome, timeworn face. He looked to be seventy or so. Old scars, four white seams, ran from his left cheekbone down to the jaw. His gaze was clear, direct, intense. “They’re ripe,” he said, “though they’ll be even better tomorrow.” He held out his handful of little yellow plums.

“Lord Sparrowhawk,” the stranger said huskily. “Archmage.”

The old man gave a curt nod of acknowledgment. “Come into the shade,” he said.

The stranger followed him, and did what he was told: he sat down on a wooden bench in the shade of the gnarled tree nearest the house; he accepted the plums, now rinsed and served in a wicker basket; he ate one, then another, then a third. Questioned, he admitted that he had eaten nothing that day. He sat while the master of the house went into it, coming out presently with bread and cheese and half an onion. The guest ate the bread and cheese and onion and drank the cup of cold water his host brought him. The host ate plums to keep him company.

“You look tired. How far have you come?”

“From Roke.”

The old man’s expression was hard to read. He said only, “I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

“I’m from Taon, lord. I went from Taon to Roke. And there the Lord Patterner told me I should come here. To you.”

“Why?”

It was a formidable gaze.

“Because you
walked across the dark land living
. . .” The stranger’s husky voice died away.

The old man picked up the words: “
And came to the far shores of the day.
Yes. But that was spoken in prophecy of the coming of our King, Lebannen.”

“You were with him, lord.”

“I was. And he gained his kingdom there. But I left mine there. So don’t call me by any title. Hawk, or Sparrowhawk, as you please. And how shall I call you?”

The man murmured his use-name: “Alder.”

Food and drink and shade and sitting down had clearly eased him, but he still looked exhausted. He had a weary sadness in him; his face was full of it.