The Farthest Shore (23 page)

“That, I think, we cannot do. Lad, put up your sword. It is but a sending, an appearance, no true man. As well draw blade against the wind. In Havnor, when your hair was white, you were called Cob. But that was only a use-name. How shall we call you when we meet you?”

“You will call me Lord,” said the tall figure on the dune’s edge.

“Aye, and what else?”

“King and Master.”

At that Orm Embar hissed, a loud and hideous sound, and his great eyes gleamed; yet he turned his head away from the man, and sank crouching in his tracks, as if he could not move.

“And where shall we come to you and when?”

“In my domain and at my pleasure.”

“Very well,” said Ged, and lifting up his staff moved it a little toward the tall man—and the man was gone, like a candle-flame blown out.

Arren stared, and the dragon rose up mightily on his four crooked legs, his mail clanking and the lips writhing back from his teeth. But the mage leaned on his staff again.

“It was only a sending. A presentment or image of the man. It can speak and hear, but there’s no power in it, save what our fear may lend it. Nor is it even true in seeming, unless the sender so wishes. We have not seen what he now looks like, I guess.”

“Is he near, do you think?”

“Sendings do not cross water. He is on Selidor. But Selidor is a great island: broader than Roke or Gont and near as long as Enlad. We may seek him long.”

Then the dragon spoke. Ged listened and turned to Arren. “Thus says the Lord of Selidor: ‘I have come back to my own land, nor will I leave it. I will find the Unmaker and bring you to him, that together we may abolish him.’ And have I not said that what a dragon hunts, he finds?”

Thereupon Ged went down on one knee before the great creature, as a liegeman kneels before a king, and thanked him in his own tongue. The breath of the dragon, so close, was hot on his bowed head.

Orm Embar dragged his scaly weight up the dune once more, beat his wings, and took the air.

Ged brushed the sand from his clothes and said to Arren, “Now you have seen me kneel. And maybe you’ll see me kneel once more, before the end.”

Arren did not ask what he meant; in their long companionship he had learned that there was reason in the mage’s reserve. Yet it seemed to him that there was evil omen in the words.

They crossed over the dune to the beach once more to make sure the boat lay high above the reach of tide or storm, and to take from her cloaks for the night and what food they had left. Ged paused a minute by the slender prow which had borne him over
strange seas so long, so far; he laid his hand on it, but he set no spell and said no word. Then they struck inland, northward, once again, toward the hills.

They walked all day, and at evening camped by a stream that wound down toward the reed-choked lakes and marshes. Though it was full summer the wind blew chill, coming from the west, from the endless, landless reaches of the open sea. A mist veiled the sky, and no stars shone above the hills on which no hearth-fire or window-light had ever gleamed.

In the darkness Arren woke. Their small fire was dead, but a westering moon lit the land with a grey, misty light. In the stream-valley and on the hillside about it stood a great multitude of people, all still, all silent, their faces turned toward Ged and Arren. Their eyes caught no light of the moon.

Arren dared not speak, but he put his hand on Ged’s arm. The mage stirred and sat up, saying, “What’s the matter?” He followed Arren’s gaze and saw the silent people.

They were all clothed darkly, men and women alike. Their faces could not be clearly seen in the faint light, but it seemed to Arren that among those who stood nearest them in the valley, across the little stream, there were some whom he knew, though he could not say their names.

Ged stood up, the cloak falling from him. His face and hair and shirt shone silvery pale, as if the moonlight gathered itself to him. He held out his arm in a wide gesture and said aloud, “O you
who have lived, go free! I break the bond that holds you:
Anvassa mane harw pennodathe!
”

For a moment they stood still, the multitude of silent people. They turned away slowly, seeming to walk into the grey darkness, and were gone.

Ged sat down. He drew a deep breath. He looked at Arren and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and his touch was warm and firm. “There’s nothing to fear, Lebannen,” he said gently, mockingly. “They were only the dead.”

Arren nodded, though his teeth were chattering and he felt cold to his very bones. “How did,” he began, but his jaw and lips would not obey him yet.

Ged understood him. “They came at his summoning. This is what he promises: eternal life. At his word they may return. At his bidding they must walk upon the hills of life, though they cannot stir a blade of grass.”

“Is he—is he then dead, too?”

Ged shook his head, brooding. “The dead cannot summon the dead back into the world. No, he has the powers of a living man, and more. . . . But if any thought to follow him, he tricked them. He keeps his power for himself. He plays King of the Dead; and not only of the dead. . . . But they were only shadows.”

“I don’t know why I fear them,” Arren said with shame.

“You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,” the mage said. He laid new wood on
the fire and blew on the small coals under the ashes. A little flare of brightness bloomed on the twigs of brushwood, a grateful light to Arren. “And life also is a terrible thing,” Ged said, “and must be feared and praised.”

They both sat back, wrapping their cloaks close about them. They were silent awhile. Then Ged spoke very gravely. “Lebannen, how long he may tease us here with sendings and with shadows, I do not know. But you know where he will go at last.”

“Into the dark land.”

“Aye. Among them.”

“I have seen them now. I will go with you.”

“Is it faith in me that moves you? You may trust my love, but do not trust my strength. For I think I have met my match.”

“I will go with you.”

“But if I am defeated, if my power or my life is spent, I cannot guide you back; you cannot return alone.”

“I will return with you.”

At that Ged said, “You enter your manhood at the gate of death.” And then he said that word or name by which the dragon had twice called Arren, speaking it very low: “
Agni—Agni
Lebannen.”

After that they spoke no more, and presently sleep came back into them, and they lay down by their small and briefly burning fire.

The next morning they walked on, going north and west; this was Arren’s decision, not Ged’s, who said, “Choose us our
way, lad; the ways are all alike to me.” They made no haste, for they had no goal, waiting for some sign from Orm Embar. They followed the lowest, outmost range of hills, mostly within sight of the ocean. The grass was dry and short, blowing and blowing forever in the wind. The hills rose up golden and forlorn upon their right, and on their left lay the salt marshes and the western sea. Once they saw swans flying, far away in the south. No other breathing creature did they see all that day. A kind of weariness of dread, of waiting for the worst, grew in Arren all day long. Impatience and a dull anger rose in him. He said, after hours of silence, “This land is as dead as the land of death itself!”

“Do not say that,” the mage said sharply. He strode on awhile and then went on, in a changed voice, “Look at this land; look about you. This is your kingdom, the kingdom of life. This is your immortality. Look at the hills, the mortal hills. They do not endure forever. The hills with the living grass on them, and the streams of water running. . . . In all the world, in all the worlds, in all the immensity of time, there is no other like each of those streams, rising cold out of the earth where no eye sees it, running through the sunlight and the darkness to the sea. Deep are the springs of being, deeper than life, than death. . . .”

He stopped, but in his eyes as he looked at Arren and at the sunlit hills there was a great, wordless, grieving love. And Arren saw that, and seeing it saw him, saw him for the first time whole, as he was.

“I cannot say what I mean,” Ged said unhappily.

But Arren thought of that first hour in the Fountain Court, of the man who had knelt by the running water of the fountain; and joy, as clear as that remembered water, welled up in him. He looked at his companion and said, “I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?”

“Aye, lad,” said Ged, gently and with pain.

They went on together in silence. But Arren saw the world now with his companion’s eyes and saw the living splendor that was revealed about them in the silent, desolate land, as if by a power of enchantment surpassing any other, in every blade of the wind-bowed grass, every shadow, every stone. So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again.

As evening came on serried lines of clouds rose from the west, borne on great winds from the sea, and burnt fiery before the sun, reddening it as it sank. As he gathered brushwood for their fire in a creek-valley, in that red light, Arren glanced up and saw a man standing not ten feet from him. The man’s face looked vague and strange, but Arren knew him, the Dyer of Lorbanery, Sopli, who was dead.

Behind him stood others, all with sad, staring faces. They seemed to speak, but Arren could not hear their words, only a
kind of whispering blown away by the west wind. Some of them came toward him slowly.

He stood and looked at them, and again at Sopli; and then he turned his back on them, stooped, and picked up one more stick of brushwood, though his hands shook. He added it to his load, and picked up another, and one more. Then he straightened and looked back. There was no one in the valley, only the red light burning on the grass. He returned to Ged and set down his load of firewood, but he said nothing of what he had seen.

All that night, in the misty darkness of that land empty of living souls, when he woke from fitful sleep he heard about him the whispering of the souls of the dead. He steadied his will, and did not listen, and slept again.

Both he and Ged woke late, when the sun, already a hand’s breadth above the hills, broke free at last from fog and brightened the cold land. As they ate their small morning meal the dragon came, wheeling above them in the air. Fire shot from his jaws, and smoke and sparks from his red nostrils; his teeth gleamed like blades of ivory in that lurid glare. But he said nothing, though Ged hailed him, crying in his language, “Hast found him, Orm Embar?”

The dragon threw back his head and arched his body strangely, raking the wind with his razor talons. Then he set off flying fast to the west, looking back at them as he went.

Ged gripped his staff and struck it on the ground. “He cannot
speak,” he said. “He cannot speak! The words of the Making are taken from him, and he is left like an adder, like a tongueless worm, his wisdom dumb. Yet he can lead, and we can follow!” Swinging up their light packs on their backs, they strode westward across the hills, as Orm Embar had flown.

Eight miles or more they went, not slackening that first, swift, steady pace. Now the sea lay on either hand, and they walked on a long, falling ridge-back that ran down at last through dry reeds and winding creek-beds to an outcurving beach of sand, colored like ivory. This was the westernmost cape of all the lands, the end of earth.

Orm Embar crouched on that ivory sand, his head low like an angry cat’s and his breath coming in gasps of fire. Some way before him, between him and the long, low breakers of the sea, stood a thing like a hut or shelter, white, as if built of long-bleached driftwood. But there was no driftwood on this shore which faced no other land. As they came closer Arren saw that the ramshackle walls were built up of great bones: whales’ bones, he thought at first, and then saw the white triangles edged like knives, and knew they were the bones of a dragon.

They came to the place. Sunlight on the sea glittered through crevices between the bones. The lintel of the doorway was a thighbone longer than a man. On it stood a human skull, staring with hollow eyes at the hills of Selidor.

They stopped there, and as they looked up at the skull a man
came out of the doorway under it. He wore an armor of gilt bronze of ancient fashion; it was rent as if by hatchet blows, and the jeweled scabbard of his sword was empty. His face was stern, with arched, black brows and narrow nose; his eyes were dark, keen, and sorrowful. There were wounds on his arms and in his throat and side; they bled no longer, but they were mortal wounds. He stood erect and still, and looked at them.

Ged took one step toward him. They were somewhat alike, thus face-to-face.

“Thou art Erreth-Akbe,” Ged said. The other gazed at him steadily and nodded once, but did not speak.

“Even thou, even thou must do his bidding.” Rage was in Ged’s voice. “O my lord, and best and bravest of us all, rest in thy honor and in death!” And raising his hands, Ged brought them down in a great gesture, saying again those words he had spoken to the multitudes of the dead. His hands left behind on the air a moment a broad, bright track. When it was gone, the armored man was gone, and only the sun dazzled on the sand where he had stood.

Ged struck at the house of bones with his staff, and it fell and vanished away. Nothing of it was left but one great rib bone that stuck up out of the sand.

He turned to Orm Embar. “Is it here, Orm Embar? Is this the place?”

The dragon opened his mouth and made a huge, gasping hiss.

“Here on the last shore of the world. That is well!” Then
holding his black yew staff in his left hand, Ged opened his arms in the gesture of invocation, and spoke. Though he spoke in the language of the Making, yet Arren understood, at last, as all who hear that invocation must understand, for it has power over all: “Now do I summon you and here, my enemy, before my eyes and in the flesh, and bind you by the word that will not be spoken till time’s end, to come!”