The Farthest Shore (8 page)

Slowly Hare stood up. He dusted his knees with his single hand and hid the maimed arm behind his back. He looked around him, looked at Arren; he was seeing what he looked at now. He turned away presently and sat down on his mattress. Arren remained standing, on guard; but, with the simplicity of one whose childhood had been totally without furnishings, Sparrowhawk sat down cross-legged on the bare floor. “Tell me how you lost your craft and the language of your craft,” he said.

Hare did not answer for a while. He began to beat his mutilated arm against his thigh in a restless, jerky way, and at last he said, forcing the words out in bursts, “They cut off my hand. I can’t weave the spells. They cut off my hand. The blood ran out, ran dry.”

“But that was after you’d lost your power, Hare, or else they could not have done it.”

“Power . . .”

“Power over the winds and the waves and men. You called them by their names and they obeyed you.”

“Yes. I remember being alive,” the man said in a soft, hoarse voice. “And I knew the words and the names . . .”

“Are you dead now?”

“No. Alive. Alive. Only once I was a dragon. . . . I’m not dead. I sleep sometimes. Sleep comes very close to death, everyone knows that. The dead walk in dreams, everyone knows that. They come to you alive, and they say things. They walk out of death into the dreams. There’s a way. And if you go on far enough there’s a way back all the way. All the way. You can find it if you know where to look. And if you’re willing to pay the price.”

“What price is that?” Sparrowhawk’s voice floated on the dim air like the shadow of a falling leaf.

“Life—what else? What can you buy life with, but life?” Hare rocked back and forth on his pallet, a cunning, uncanny
brightness in his eyes. “You see,” he said, “they can cut off my hand. They can cut off my head. It doesn’t matter. I can find the way back. I know where to look. Only men of power can go there.”

“Wizards, you mean?”

“Yes.” Hare hesitated, seeming to attempt the word several times; he could not say it. “Men of power,” he repeated. “And they must—and they must give it up. Pay.”

Then he fell sullen, as if the word “pay” had at last roused associations, and he had realized that he was giving information away instead of selling it. Nothing more could be got from him, not even the hints and stammers about “a way back” which Sparrowhawk seemed to find meaningful, and soon enough the mage stood up. “Well, half-answers beat no answers,” he said, “and the same with payment,” and, deft as a conjuror, he flipped a gold piece onto the pallet in front of Hare.

Hare picked it up. He looked at it and Sparrowhawk and Arren, with jerky movements of his head. “Wait,” he stammered. As soon as the situation changed he lost his grip of it and now groped miserably after what he wanted to say. “Tonight,” he said at last. “Wait. Tonight. I have hazia.”

“I don’t need it.”

“To show you—To show you the way. Tonight. I’ll take you. I’ll show you. You can get there, because you . . . you’re . . .” He groped for the word until Sparrowhawk said, “I am a wizard.”

“Yes! So we can—we can get there. To the way. When I dream. In the dream. See? I’ll take you. You’ll go with me, to the . . . to the way.”

Sparrowhawk stood, solid and pondering, in the middle of the dim room. “Maybe,” he said at last. “If we come, we’ll be here by dark.” Then he turned to Arren, who opened the door at once, eager to be gone.

The dank, overshadowed street seemed bright as a garden after Hare’s room. They struck out for the upper city by the shortest way, a steep stairway of stone between ivy-grown house walls. Arren breathed in and out like a sea lion—“Ugh!—Are you going back there?”

“Well, I will, if I can’t get the same information from a less risky source. He’s likely to set an ambush for us.”

“But aren’t you defended against thieves and so on?”

“Defended?” said Sparrowhawk. “What do you mean? D’you think I go about wrapped up in spells like an old woman afraid of the rheumatism? I haven’t the time for it. I hide my face to hide our quest; that’s all. We can look out for each other. But the fact is we’re not going to be able to keep out of danger on this journey.”

“Of course not,” Arren said stiffly, angry, angered in his pride. “I did not seek to do so.”

“That’s just as well,” the mage said, inflexible, and yet with a kind of good humor that appeased Arren’s temper. Indeed he was startled by his own anger; he had never thought to speak thus to
the Archmage. But then, this was and was not the Archmage, this Hawk with the snubbed nose and square, ill-shaven cheeks, whose voice was sometimes one man’s voice and sometimes another’s: a stranger, unreliable.

“Does it make sense, what he told you?” Arren asked, for he did not look forward to going back to that dim room above the stinking river. “All that fiddle-faddle about being alive and dead and coming back with his head cut off?”

“I don’t know if it makes sense. I wanted to talk with a wizard who had lost his power. He says that he hasn’t lost it but given it—traded it. For what? Life for life, he said. Power for power. No, I don’t understand him, but he is worth listening to.”

Sparrowhawk’s steady reasonableness shamed Arren further. He felt himself petulant and nervous, like a child. Hare had fascinated him, but now that the fascination was broken he felt a sick disgust, as if he had eaten something vile. He resolved not to speak again until he had controlled his temper. Next moment he missed his step on the worn, slick stairs, slipped, and recovered himself, scraping his hands on the stones. “Oh curse this filthy town!” he broke out in rage. And the mage replied dryly, “No need to, I think.”

There was indeed something wrong about Hort Town, wrong in the very air, so that one might think seriously that it lay under a curse; and yet this was not a presence of any quality, but rather an absence, a weakening of all qualities, like a sickness that soon
infected the spirit of any visitor. Even the warmth of the afternoon sun was sickly, too heavy a heat for March. The squares and streets bustled with activity and business, but there was neither order nor prosperity. Goods were poor, prices high, and the markets were unsafe for vendors and buyers alike, being full of thieves and roaming gangs. Not many women were on the streets, and the few there were appeared mostly in groups. It was a city without law or governance. Talking with people, Arren and Sparrowhawk soon learned that there was in fact no council or mayor or lord left in Hort Town. Some of those who had used to rule the city had died, and some had resigned, and some had been assassinated; various chiefs lorded it over various quarters of the city, the harbor guardsmen ran the port and lined their pockets, and so on.

There was no center left to the city. The people, for all their restless activity, seemed purposeless. Craftsmen seemed to lack the will to work well; even the robbers robbed because it was all they knew how to do. All the brawl and brightness of a great port-city was there, on the surface, but all about the edges of it sat the hazia-eaters, motionless. And under the surface, things did not seem entirely real, not even the faces, the sounds, the smells. They would fade from time to time during that long, warm afternoon while Sparrowhawk and Arren walked the streets and talked with this person and that. They would fade quite away. The striped awnings, the dirty cobbles, the colored walls, and all the vividness of being would be gone,
leaving the city a dream city, empty and dreary in the hazy sunlight.

Only at the top of the town where they went to rest awhile in late afternoon did this sickly mood of daydream break for a while. “This is not a town for luck,” Sparrowhawk had said some hours ago, and now after hours of aimless wandering and fruitless conversations with strangers, he looked tired and grim. His disguise was wearing a little thin; a certain hardness and darkness could be seen through the bluff sea-trader’s face. Arren had not been able to shake off the morning’s irritability. They sat down on the coarse turf of the hilltop under the leaves of a grove of pendick trees, dark-leaved and budded thickly with red buds, some open. From there they saw nothing of the city but its tile roofs multitudinously scaling downward to the sea. The bay opened its arms wide, slate blue beneath the spring haze, reaching on to the edge of air. No lines were drawn, no boundaries. They sat gazing at that immense blue space. Arren’s mind cleared, opening out to meet and celebrate the world.

When they went to drink from a little stream nearby, running clear over brown rocks from its spring in some princely garden on the hill behind them, he drank deep and doused his head right under the cold water. Then he got up and declaimed the lines from the
Deed of Morred.

Praised are the Fountains of Shelieth, the silver harp of the waters,

But blest in my name forever this stream that stanched my thirst!

Sparrowhawk laughed at him, and he also laughed. He shook his head like a dog, and the bright spray flew out fine in the last gold sunlight.

They had to leave the grove and go down into the streets again, and when they had made their supper at a stall that sold greasy fishcakes, night was getting heavy in the air. Darkness came fast in the narrow streets. “We’d better go, lad,” said Sparrowhawk, and Arren said, “To the boat?” but knew it was not to the boat but to the house above the river and the empty, dusty, terrible room.

Hare was waiting for them in the doorway.

He lighted an oil lamp to show them up the black stairs. Its tiny flame trembled continually as he held it, throwing vast, quick shadows up the walls.

He had got another sack of straw for his visitors to sit on, but Arren took his place on the bare floor by the door. The door opened outward, and to guard it he should have sat himself down outside it: but that pitch-black hall was more than he could stand, and he wanted to keep an eye on Hare. Sparrowhawk’s attention and perhaps his powers were going to be turned on what Hare had to tell him or show him; it was up to Arren to keep alert for trickery.

Hare held himself straighter and trembled less; he had cleaned his mouth and teeth; he spoke sanely enough at first, though with excitement. His eyes in the lamplight were so dark that they seemed, like the eyes of animals, to show no whites. He disputed earnestly with Sparrowhawk, urging him to eat hazia. “I want to
take you, take you with me. We’ve got to go the same way. Before long I’ll be going, whether you’re ready or not. You must have the hazia to follow me.”

“I think I can follow you.”

“Not where I’m going. This isn’t . . . spell-casting.” He seemed unable to say the words “wizard” or “wizardry.” “I know you can get to the—the place, you know, the wall. But it isn’t there. It’s a different way.”

“If you go, I can follow.”

Hare shook his head. His handsome, ruined face was flushed; he glanced over at Arren often, including him, though he spoke only to Sparrowhawk. “Look: there are two kinds of men, aren’t there? Our kind and the rest. The . . . the dragons and the others. People without power are only half-alive. They don’t count. They don’t know what they dream; they’re afraid of the dark. But the others, the lords of men, aren’t afraid to go into the dark. We have strength.”

“So long as we know the names of things.”

“But names don’t matter there—that’s the point, that’s the point! It isn’t what you do, what you know, that you need. Spells are no good. You have to forget all that, to let it go. That’s where eating hazia helps; you forget the names, you let the forms of things go, you go straight to the reality. I’m going to be going pretty soon now; if you want to find out where, you ought to do as I say. I say as he does. You must be a lord of men
to be a lord of life. You have to find the secret. I could tell you its name but what’s a name? A name isn’t real, the real, the real forever. Dragons can’t go there. Dragons die. They all die. I took so much tonight you’ll never catch me. Not a patch on me. Where I get lost you can lead me. Remember what the secret is? Remember? No death. No death—no! No sweaty bed and rotting coffin, no more, never. The blood dries up like the dry river and it’s gone. No fear. No death. The names are gone and the words and the fear, gone. Show me where I get lost, show me, lord. . . .”

So he went on, in a choked rapture of words that was like the chanting of a spell, and yet made no spell, no whole, no sense. Arren listened, listened, striving to understand. If only he could understand! Sparrowhawk should do as he said and take the drug, this once, so that he could find out what Hare was talking about, the mystery that he would not or could not speak. Why else were they here? But then (Arren looked from Hare’s ecstatic face to the other profile) perhaps the mage understood already. . . . Hard as rock, that profile. Where was the snubbed nose, the bland look? Hawk the sea-trader was gone, forgotten. It was the mage, the Archmage, who sat there.

Hare’s voice now was a crooning mumble, and he rocked his body as he sat cross-legged. His face had grown haggard and his mouth slack. Facing him, in the tiny, steady light of the oil lamp set on the floor between them, the other never spoke, but he had
reached out and taken Hare’s hand, holding him. Arren had not seen him reach out. There were gaps in the order of events, gaps of nonexistence—drowsiness, it must be. Surely some hours had passed; it might be near midnight. If he slept, would he too be able to follow Hare into his dream and come to the place, the secret way? Perhaps he could. It seemed quite possible now. But he was to guard the door. He and Sparrowhawk had scarcely spoken of it, but both were aware that in having them come back at night Hare might have planned some ambush; he had been a pirate; he knew robbers. They had said nothing, but Arren knew that he was to stand guard, for while the mage made this strange journey of the spirit he would be defenseless. But like a fool he had left his sword on board the boat, and how much good would his knife be if that door swung suddenly open behind him? But that would not happen: he could listen and hear. Hare was not speaking anymore. Both men were utterly silent; the whole house was silent. Nobody could come up those swaying stairs without some noise. He could speak, if he heard a noise: shout aloud, and the trance would break, and Sparrowhawk would turn and defend himself and Arren with all the vengeful lightning of a wizard’s rage. . . . When Arren had sat down at the door, Sparrowhawk had looked at him, only a glance, approval: approval and trust. He was the guard. There was no danger if he kept on guard. But it was hard, hard to keep watching those two faces, the little pearl of the lamp-flame between them on
the floor, both silent now, both still, their eyes open but not seeing the light or the dusty room, not seeing the world, but some other world of dream or death . . . to watch them and not to try to follow them. . . .