The Tombs of Atuan (15 page)

She listened, though her expression did not change. He said no more. They were silent; but it was not the silence that had been in that room before she entered. There was the breathing of two of them now, and the movement of life in their veins, and the burning of the candle in its lantern of tin, a tiny, lively sound.

“How is it that you know my name?”

He walked up and down the room, stirring up the fine dust, stretching his arms and shoulders in an effort to shake off the numbing chill.

“Knowing names is my job. My art. To weave the magic of a thing, you see, one must find its true name out. In my lands we keep our true names hidden all our lives long, from all but those whom we trust utterly; for there is great power, and great peril, in a name. Once, at the beginning of time, when Segoy raised the isles of Earthsea from the ocean deeps, all things bore their own true names. And all doing of magic, all wizardry, hangs still upon
the knowledge—the relearning, the remembering—of that true and ancient language of the Making. There are spells to learn, of course, ways to use the words; and one must know the consequences, too. But what a wizard spends his life at is finding out the names of things, and finding out how to find out the names of things.”

“How did you find out mine?”

He looked at her a moment, a deep clear glance across the shadows between them; he hesitated a moment. “I cannot tell you that. You are like a lantern swathed and covered, hidden away in a dark place. Yet the light shines; they could not put out the light. They could not hide you. As I know the light, as I know you, I know your name, Tenar. That is my gift, my power. I cannot tell you more. But tell me this: what will you do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Kossil has found an empty grave, by now. What will she do?”

“I don’t know. If I go back up, she can have me killed. It is death for a High Priestess to lie. She could have me sacrificed on the steps of the Throne if she wanted. And Manan would have to really cut off my head this time, instead of just lifting the sword and waiting for the Dark Figure to stop it. But this time it wouldn’t stop. It would come down and cut off my head.”

Her voice was dull and slow. He frowned. “If we stay here long,” he said, “you are going to go mad, Tenar. The anger of the Nameless Ones is heavy on your mind. And on mine. It’s better now that
you’re here, much better. But it was a long time before you came, and I’ve used up most of my strength. No one can withstand the Dark Ones long alone. They are very strong.” He stopped; his voice had sunk low, and he seemed to have lost the thread of his speech. He rubbed his hands over his forehead, and presently went to drink again from the flask. He broke off a hunch of bread and sat down on the chest opposite to eat it.

What he said was true; she felt a weight, a pressure on her mind, that seemed to darken and confuse all thought and feeling. Yet she was not terrified, as she had been coming through the corridors alone. Only the utter silence outside the room seemed terrible. Why was that? She had never feared the silence of the underearth before. But never before had she disobeyed the Nameless Ones, never had she set herself against them.

She gave a little whimpering laugh at last. “Here we sit on the greatest treasure of the Empire,” she said. “The Godking would give all his wives to have one chest of it. And we haven’t even opened a lid to look.”

“I did,” said the Sparrowhawk, chewing.

“In the dark?”

“I made a little light. The werelight. It was hard to do, here. Even with my staff it would have been hard, and without it, it was like trying to light a fire with wet wood in the rain. But it came at last. And I found what I was after.”

She raised her face slowly to look at him. “The ring?”

“The half-ring. You have the other half.”

“I have it? The other half was lost—”

“And found. I wore it on a chain around my neck. You took it off, and asked me if I couldn’t afford a better talisman. The only talisman better than half the Ring of Erreth-Akbe would be the whole. But then, as they say, half a loaf’s better than none. So you now have my half, and I have yours.” He smiled at her across the shadows of the tomb.

“You said, when I took it, that I didn’t know what to do with it.”

“That was true.”

“And you do know?”

He nodded.

“Tell me. Tell me what it is, the ring, and how you came upon the lost half, and how you came here, and why. All this I must know, then maybe I will see what to do.”

“Maybe you will. Very well. What is it, the Ring of Erreth-Akbe? Well, you can see that it’s not precious looking, and it’s not even a ring. It’s too big. An arm-ring, perhaps, yet it seems too small for that. No man knows who it was made for. Elfarran the Fair wore it once, before the Isle of Soléa was lost beneath the sea; and it was old when she wore it. And at last it came into the hands of Erreth-Akbe. . . . The metal is hard silver, pierced with nine holes. There’s a design like waves scratched on the outside, and nine Runes of Power on the inside. The half you have bears four runes and a bit of another; and mine likewise. The break came
right across that one symbol, and destroyed it. It is what’s been called, since then, the Lost Rune. The other eight are known to Mages: Pirr that protects from madness and from wind and fire, Ges that gives endurance, and so on. But the broken rune was the one that bound the lands. It was the Bond-Rune, the sign of dominion, the sign of peace. No king could rule well if he did not rule beneath that sign. No one knows how it was written. Since it was lost there have been no great kings in Havnor. There have been princes and tyrants, and wars and quarreling among all the lands of Earthsea.

“So the wise lords and Mages of the Archipelago wanted the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, that they might restore the lost rune. But at last they gave up sending men out to seek it, since none could take the one half from the Tombs of Atuan, and the other half, which Erreth-Akbe gave to a Kargish king, was lost long since. They said there was no use in the search. That was many hundred years ago.

“Now I come into it thus. When I was a little older than you are now, I was on a chase, a kind of hunt across the sea. That which I hunted tricked me, so that I was cast up on a desert isle, not far off the coasts of Karego-At and Atuan, south and west of here. It was a little islet, not much more than a sandbar, with long grassy dunes down the middle, and a spring of salty water, and nothing else.

“Yet two people lived there. An old man and woman; brother and sister, I think. They were terrified of me. They had not seen any other human face for—how long? Years, tens of years. But I
was in need, and they were kind to me. They had a hut of driftwood, and a fire. The old woman gave me food, mussels she pulled from the rocks at low tide, dried meat of seabirds they killed by throwing stones. She was afraid of me, but she gave me food. Then when I did nothing to frighten her, she came to trust me, and she showed me her treasure. She had a treasure, too. . . . It was a little dress. All of silk stuff, with pearls. A little child’s dress, a princess’s dress. She was wearing uncured sealskin.

“We couldn’t talk. I didn’t know the Kargish tongue then, and they knew no language of the Archipelago, and little enough of their own. They must have been brought there as young children, and left to die. I don’t know why, and doubt that they knew. They knew nothing but the island, the wind, and the sea. But when I left she gave me a present. She gave me the lost half of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe.”

He paused for a while.

“I didn’t know it for what it was, no more than she did. The greatest gift of this age of the world, and it was given by a poor old foolish woman in sealskins to a silly lout who stuffed it into his pocket and said ‘Thanks!’ and sailed off. . . . Well, so I went on, and did what I had to do. And then other things came up, and I went to the Dragons’ Run, westward, and so on. But all the time I kept the thing with me, because I felt a gratitude toward that old woman who had given me the only present she had to give. I put a chain through one of the holes pierced in it, and wore it, and
never thought about it. And then one day on Selidor, the Farthest Isle, the land where Erreth-Akbe died in his battle with the dragon Orm—on Selidor I spoke with a dragon, one of that lineage of Orm. He told me what I wore upon my breast.

“He thought it very funny that I hadn’t known. Dragons think we are amusing. But they remember Erreth-Akbe; him they speak of as if he were a dragon, not a man.

“When I came back to the Inmost Isles, I went at last to Havnor. I was born on Gont, which lies not far west of your Kargish lands, and I had wandered a good deal since, but I had never been to Havnor. It was time to go there. I saw the white towers, and spoke with the great men, the merchants and the princes and the lords of the ancient domains. I told them what I had. I told them that if they liked, I would go seek the rest of the ring in the Tombs of Atuan, in order to find the Lost Rune, the key to peace. For we need peace sorely in the world. They were full of praise; and one of them even gave me money to provision my boat. So I learned your tongue, and came to Atuan.”

He fell silent, gazing before him into the shadows.

“Didn’t the people in our towns know you for a Westerner, by your skin, by your speech?”

“Oh, it’s easy to fool people,” he said rather absently, “if you know the tricks. You make some illusion-changes, and nobody but another Mage will see through them. And you have no wizards or Mages here in the Kargish lands. That’s a queer thing. You
banished all your wizards long ago, and forbade the practice of the Art Magic; and now you scarcely believe in it.”

“I was taught to disbelieve in it. It is contrary to the teachings of the Priest Kings. But I know that only sorcery could have got you to the Tombs, and in at the door of red rock.”

“Not only sorcery, but good advice also. We use writing more than you, I think. Do you know how to read?”

“No. It is one of the black arts.”

He nodded. “But a useful one,” he said. “An ancient unsuccessful thief left certain descriptions of the Tombs of Atuan, and instructions for entering, if one were able to use one of the Great Spells of Opening. All this was written down in a book in the treasury of a prince of Havnor. He let me read it. So I got as far as the great cavern—”

“The Undertomb.”

“The thief who wrote the way to enter thought that the treasure was there, in the Undertomb. So I looked there, but I had the feeling that it must be better hidden, farther on in the maze. I knew the entrance to the Labyrinth, and when I saw you, I went to it, thinking to hide in the maze and search it. That was a mistake, of course. The Nameless Ones had hold of me already, bewildering my mind. And since then I have grown only weaker and stupider. One must not submit to them, one must resist, keep one’s spirit always strong and certain. I learned that a long time ago. But it’s hard to do, here, where they are so strong. They
are not gods, Tenar. But they are stronger than any man.”

They were both silent for a long time.

“What else did you find in the treasure chests?” she asked dully.

“Rubbish. Gold, jewels, crowns, swords. Nothing to which any man alive has any claim. . . . Tell me this, Tenar. How were you chosen to be the Priestess of the Tombs?”

“When the First Priestess dies they go looking all through Atuan for a girl-baby born on the night the Priestess died. And they always find one. Because it is the Priestess reborn. When the child is five they bring it here to the Place. And when it is six it is given to the Dark Ones and its soul is eaten by them. And so it belongs to them, and has belonged to them since the beginning days. And it has no name.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I have always believed it.”

“Do you believe it now?”

She said nothing.

Again the shadowy silence fell between them. After a long time she said, “Tell me . . . tell me about the dragons in the West.”

“Tenar, what will you do? We can’t sit here telling each other tales until the candle burns out, and the darkness comes again.”

“I don’t know what to do. I am afraid.” She sat erect on the stone chest, her hands clenched one in the other, and spoke loudly, like one in pain. She said, “I am afraid of the dark.”

He answered softly. “You must make a choice. Either you must
leave me, lock the door, go up to your altars and give me to your Masters; then go to the Priestess Kossil and make your peace with her—and that is the end of the story—or, you must unlock the door, and go out of it, with me. Leave the Tombs, leave Atuan, and come with me oversea. And that is the beginning of the story. You must be Arha, or you must be Tenar. You cannot be both.”

The deep voice was gentle and certain. She looked through the shadows into his face, which was hard and scarred, but had in it no cruelty, no deceit.

“If I leave the service of the Dark Ones, they will kill me. If I leave this place I will die.”

“You will not die. Arha will die.”

“I cannot . . . ”

“To be reborn one must die, Tenar. It is not so hard as it looks from the other side.”

“They would not let us get out. Ever.”

“Perhaps not. Yet it’s worth trying. You have knowledge, and I have skill, and between us we have . . . ” He paused.

“We have the Ring of Erreth-Akbe.”

“Yes, that. But I thought also of another thing between us. Call it trust. . . . That is one of its names. It is a very great thing. Though each of us alone is weak, having that we are strong, stronger than the Powers of the Dark.” His eyes were clear and bright in his scarred face. “Listen, Tenar!” he said. “I came here a thief, an enemy, armed against you; and you showed me mercy, and trusted
me. And I have trusted you from the first time I saw your face, for one moment in the cave beneath the Tombs, beautiful in darkness. You have proved your trust in me. I have made no return. I will give you what I have to give. My true name is Ged. And this is yours to keep.” He had risen, and he held out to her a semicircle of pierced and carven silver. “Let the ring be rejoined,” he said.

She took it from his hand. She slipped from her neck the silver chain on which the other half was strung, and took it off the chain. She laid the two pieces in her palm so that the broken edges met, and it looked whole.