The Farthest Shore (2 page)

“You are the son of the Prince of Enlad and the
Enlades,” the Archmage said, “heir of the Principality of Morred. There is
no older heritage in all Earthsea, and none fairer. I have seen the orchards of Enlad in
the spring, and the golden roofs of Berila. . . . How are you
called?”

“I am called Arren.”

“That would be a word in the dialect of your land. What is it in our
common speech?”

The boy said, “Sword.”

The Archmage nodded. There was silence again, and then the boy said, not
boldly, but without timidity, “I had thought the Archmage knew all
languages.”

The man shook his head, watching the fountain.

“And all names. . . .”

“All names? Only Segoy who spoke the First Word, raising up the
isles from the deep sea, knew all names. To be sure,” and the bright, fierce gaze
was on Arren’s face, “if I needed to know your true name, I would know it.
But there’s no need. Arren I will call you; and I am Sparrowhawk. Tell me, how was
your voyage here?”

“Too long.”

“The winds blew ill?”

“The winds blew fair, but the news I bear is ill, Lord
Sparrowhawk.”

“Tell it, then,” the Archmage said gravely, but like one
yielding to a child’s impatience; and while Arren spoke, he looked again at
the crystal curtain of water drops falling from the upper basin into
the lower, not as if he did not listen, but as if he listened to more than the
boy’s words.

“You know, my lord, that the prince my father is a wizardly man,
being of the lineage of Morred, and having spent a year here on Roke in his youth. Some
power he has and knowledge, though he seldom uses his arts, being concerned with the
ruling and ordering of his realm, the governance of cities and matters of trade. The
fleets of our island go out westward, even into the West Reach, trading for sapphires
and ox hides and tin, and early this winter a sea captain returned to our city Berila
with a tale that came to my father’s ears, so that he had the man sent for and
heard him tell it.” The boy spoke quickly, with assurance. He had been trained by
civil, courtly people, and did not have the self-consciousness of the young.

“The sea captain said that on the isle of Narveduen, which is some
five hundred miles west of us by the ship lanes, there was no more magic. Spells had no
power there, he said, and the words of wizardry were forgotten. My father asked him if
it was that all the sorcerers and witches had left that isle, and he answered,
‘No: there were some there who had been sorcerers, but they cast no more spells,
not even so much as a charm for kettle-mending or the finding of a lost needle.’
And my father asked, ‘Were not the folk of Narveduen dismayed?’ And the sea
captain said again, ‘No, they seemed uncaring.’ And indeed, he said, there
was sickness
among them, and their autumn harvest had been poor, and
still they seemed careless. He said—I was there, when he spoke to the
prince—he said, ‘They were like sick men, like a man who has been told he
must die within the year, and tells himself it is not true, and he will live forever.
They go about,’ he said, ‘without looking at the world.’ When other
traders returned, they repeated the tale that Narveduen had become a poor land and had
lost the arts of wizardry. But all this was mere tales of the Reach, which are always
strange, and only my father gave it much thought.

“Then in the New Year, in the Festival of the Lambs that we hold in
Enlad, when the shepherds’ wives come into the city bringing the firstlings of the
flocks, my father named the wizard Root to say the spells of increase over the lambs.
But Root came back to our hall distressed and laid his staff down and said, ‘My
lord, I cannot say the spells.’ My father questioned him, but he could say only,
‘I have forgotten the words and the patterning.’ So my father went to the
marketplace and said the spells himself, and the festival was completed. But I saw him
come home to the palace that evening, and he looked grim and weary, and he said to me,
‘I said the words, but I do not know if they had meaning.’ And indeed
there’s trouble among the flocks this spring, the ewes dying in birth, and many
lambs born dead, and some are . . . deformed.” The boy’s
easy, eager voice dropped; he winced as he said the word and swallowed. “I saw
some of them,” he said. There was a pause.

“My father believes that this matter, and the
tale of Narveduen, show some evil at work in our part of the world. He desires the
counsel of the Wise.”

“That he sent you proves that his desire is urgent,” said the
Archmage. “You are his only son, and the voyage from Enlad to Roke is not short.
Is there more to tell?”

“Only some old wives’ tales from the hills.”

“What do the old wives say?”

“That all the fortunes witches read in smoke and water pools tell of
ill, and that their love-potions go amiss. But these are people without true
wizardry.”

“Fortune-telling and love-potions are not of much account, but old
women are worth listening to. Well, your message will indeed be discussed by the Masters
of Roke. But I do not know, Arren, what counsel they may give your father. For Enlad is
not the first land from which such tidings have come.”

Arren’s trip from the north, down past the great isle Havnor and
through the Inmost Sea to Roke, was his first voyage. Only in these last few weeks had
he seen lands that were not his own homeland, become aware of distance and diversity,
and recognized that there was a great world beyond the pleasant hills of Enlad, and many
people in it. He was not yet used to thinking widely, and so it was a while before he
understood. “Where else?” he asked then, a little dismayed. For he had hoped
to bring a prompt cure home to Enlad.

“In the South Reach, first. Latterly even in the
south of the Archipelago, in Wathort. There is no more magic done in Wathort, men say.
It is hard to be sure. That land has long been rebellious and piratical, and to hear a
Southern trader is to hear a liar, as they say. Yet the story is always the same: the
springs of wizardry have run dry.”

“But here on Roke—”

“Here on Roke we have felt nothing of this. We are defended here
from storm and change and all ill chance. Too well defended, perhaps. Prince, what will
you do now?”

“I shall go back to Enlad when I can bring my father some clear word
of the nature of this evil and of its remedy.”

Once more the Archmage looked at him, and this time, for all his training,
Arren looked away. He did not know why, for there was nothing unkind in the gaze of
those dark eyes. They were impartial, calm, compassionate.

All in Enlad looked up to his father, and he was his father’s son.
No man had ever looked at him thus, not as Arren, Prince of Enlad, son of the Ruling
Prince, but as Arren alone. He did not like to think that he feared the Archmage’s
gaze, but he could not meet it. It seemed to enlarge the world yet again around him, and
now not only Enlad sank to insignificance, but he himself, so that in the eyes of the
Archmage he was only a small figure, very small, in a vast scene of sea-girt lands over
which hung darkness.

He sat picking at the vivid moss that grew in the cracks of the
marble flagstones, and presently he said, hearing his voice, which
had deepened only in the last couple of years, sound thin and husky: “And I shall
do as you bid me.”

“Your duty is to your father, not to me,” the Archmage
said.

His eyes were still on Arren, and now the boy looked up. As he had made
his act of submission he had forgotten himself, and now he saw the Archmage: the
greatest wizard of all Earthsea, the man who had capped the Black Well of Fundaur and
won the Ring of Erreth-Akbe from the Tombs of Atuan and built the deep-founded sea wall
of Nepp; the sailor who knew the seas from Astowell to Selidor; the only living
Dragonlord. There he knelt beside a fountain, a short man and not young, a quiet-voiced
man, with eyes as deep as evening.

Arren scrambled up from sitting and knelt down formally on both knees, all
in haste. “My lord,” he said, stammering, “let me serve
you!”

His self-assurance was gone, his face was flushed, his voice shook.

At his hip he wore a sword in a sheath of new leather figured with inlay
of red and gold; but the sword itself was plain, with a worn cross-hilt of silvered
bronze. This he drew forth, all in haste, and offered the hilt to the Archmage, as a
liegeman to his prince.

The Archmage did not put out his hand to touch the sword hilt. He looked
at it and at Arren. “That is yours, not mine,” he said. “And you are
no man’s servant.”

“But my father said that I might stay on Roke
until I learned what this evil is and maybe some mastery—I have no skill, I
don’t think I have any power, but there were mages among my forefathers—if I
might in some way learn to be of use to you—”

“Before your ancestors were mages,” the Archmage said,
“they were kings.”

He stood up and came with silent, vigorous step to Arren, and taking the
boy’s hand made him rise. “I thank you for your offer of service, and though
I do not accept it now, yet I may, when we have taken counsel on these matters. The
offer of a generous spirit is not one to refuse lightly. Nor is the sword of the son of
Morred to be lightly turned aside! . . . Now go. The lad who brought you
here will see that you eat and bathe and rest. Go on,” and he pushed Arren lightly
between the shoulder blades, a familiarity no one had ever taken before, and which the
young prince would have resented from anyone else; but he felt the Archmage’s
touch as a thrill of glory. For Arren had fallen in love.

He had been an active boy, delighting in games, taking pride and pleasure
in the skills of body and mind, apt at his duties of ceremony and governing, which were
neither light nor simple. Yet he had never given himself entirely to anything. All had
come easily to him, and he had done all easily; it had all been a game, and he had
played at loving. But now the depths of him were wakened, not by a game or dream, but by
honor, danger, wisdom, by
a scarred face and a quiet voice and a
dark hand holding, careless of its power, the staff of yew that bore near the grip, in
silver set in the black wood, the Lost Rune of the Kings.

So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking
before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.

Forgetting courtly farewells he hurried to the doorway, awkward, radiant,
obedient. And Ged the Archmage watched him go.

G
ED STOOD AWHILE BY THE
fountain under
the ash tree, then raised his face to the sunwashed sky. “A gentle messenger for
bad news,” he said half-aloud, as if talking to the fountain. It did not listen,
but went on talking in its own silver tongue, and he listened to it awhile. Then, going
to another doorway, which Arren had not seen, and which indeed very few eyes would have
seen no matter how close they looked, he said, “Master Doorkeeper.”

A little man of no age appeared. Young he was not, so that one had to call
him old, but the word did not suit him. His face was dry and colored like ivory, and he
had a pleasant smile that made long curves in his cheeks. “What’s the
matter, Ged?” said he.

For they were alone, and he was one of the seven persons in the world who
knew the Archmage’s name. The others were the Master Namer of Roke; and Ogion the
Silent, the wizard of Re Albi, who long ago on the mountain of Gont had given Ged that
name; and the White Lady of Gont, Tenar of the Ring; and a
village
wizard in Iffish called Vetch; and in Iffish again, a house-carpenter’s wife,
mother of three girls, ignorant of all sorcery but wise in other things, who was called
Yarrow; and finally, on the other side of Earthsea, in the farthest west, two dragons:
Orm Embar and Kalessin.

“We should meet tonight,” the Archmage said. “I’ll
go to the Patterner. And I’ll send to Kurremkarmerruk, so that he’ll put his
lists away and let his students rest one evening and come to us, if not in flesh. Will
you see to the others?”

“Aye,” said the Doorkeeper, smiling, and was gone; and the
Archmage also was gone; and the fountain talked to itself all serene and never ceasing
in the sunlight of early spring.

S
OMEWHERE TO THE WEST OF
the Great House
of Roke, and often somewhat south of it, the Immanent Grove is usually to be seen. There
is no place for it on maps, and there is no way to it except for those who know the way
to it. But even novices and townsfolk and farmers can see it, always at a certain
distance, a wood of high trees whose leaves have a hint of gold in their greenness even
in the spring. And they consider—the novices, the townsfolk, the
farmers—that the Grove moves about in a mystifying manner. But in this they are
mistaken, for the Grove does not move. Its roots are the roots of being. It is all the
rest that moves.

Ged walked over the fields from the Great House. He took off his white
cloak, for the sun was at noon. A farmer plowing a brown
hillside
raised his hand in salute, and Ged replied the same way. Small birds went up into the
air and sang. The sparkweed was just coming into flower in the fallows and beside the
roads. Far up, a hawk cut a wide arc on the sky. Ged glanced up, and raised his hand
again. Down shot the bird in a rush of windy feathers, and stooped straight to the
offered wrist, gripping with yellow claws. It was no sparrowhawk but a big Ender-falcon
of Roke, a white-and-brown-barred fishing hawk. It looked sidelong at the Archmage with
one round, bright-gold eye, then clashed its hooked beak and stared at him straight on
with both round, bright-gold eyes. “Fearless,” the Archmage said to it in
the tongue of the Making.

The big hawk beat its wings and gripped with its talons, gazing at
him.

“Go then, brother, fearless one.”

The farmer, away off on the hillside under the bright sky, had stopped to
watch. Once last autumn he had watched the Archmage take a wild bird on his wrist, and
then in the next moment had seen no man, but two hawks mounting on the wind.