The Other Wind (12 page)

When it came time to mount them, there on the sands of the Onneva, Onyx was fairly daunted, and had to be coached and encouraged by the handlers, but Tehanu was up in the saddle as soon as the king. She put the reins in her crippled hand and did not use them, seeming to communicate with her mare by other means.

So the little caravan set off due west into the foothills of the Falierns, keeping up a good pace. It was the swiftest way to travel that Lebannen had at his disposal; to coast clear round South Havnor would take too long. They had the wizard Onyx with them to keep the weather favorable, clear the path of any obstacles, and defend them from any harm short of dragon fire. Against the dragons, if they encountered them, they had no defense at all, except perhaps Tehanu.

Taking counsel the evening before with his advisors and the officers of his guard, Lebannen had quickly concluded that there was no way to fight the dragons or protect the towns and fields from them: arrows were useless, shields were useless. Only the greatest mages had ever been able to defeat a dragon. He had no such mage in his service and knew of none now living, but he must defend his people as best he could, and he knew no way to do it but to try to parley with the dragons.

His majordomo had been shocked when he set off for the apartment where Tenar and Tehanu were: the king should send for those he wished to see, command them to come to him. “Not if he’s going to beg from them,” Lebannen said.

He told the startled maid who answered their door to ask if he might speak with the White Lady and the Woman of Gont. So they were known to the people of the palace and the city. That each bore her true name openly, as the king did, was so rare a matter, so defiant of rule and custom, of safety and propriety, that though people might know the name they were reluctant to say it and preferred to speak around it.

He was admitted, and having told them briefly the news he had received, said, “Tehanu, it may be that you alone in my kingdom can help me. If you can call to these dragons as you called to Kalessin, if you have any power over them, if you can speak to them and ask why they war on my people, will you do so?”

The young woman shrank from his words, turning towards her mother.

But Tenar did not offer her any shelter. She stood unmoving. After a while she said, “Tehanu, long ago I told you: when a king speaks to you, you answer. You were a child then, and didn’t answer. You’re not a child now.”

Tehanu took a step back from them both. Like a child, she hung her head. “I can’t call to them,” she said in her faint, harsh voice. “I don’t know them.”

“Can you call Kalessin?” Lebannen asked.

She shook her head. “Too far away,” she whispered. “I don’t know where.”

“But you are Kalessin’s daughter,” Tenar said. “Can you not speak to these dragons?”

She said wretchedly, “I don’t know.”

Lebannen said, “If there is any chance, Tehanu, that they’ll talk to you, that you can talk to them, I beg you to take that chance. For I can’t fight them, and don’t know their language, and how can I find what they want of us from creatures who can destroy me with a breath, with a look? Will you speak for me, for us?”

She was silent. Then, so faintly he could barely hear it, she said, “Yes.”

“Then make ready to travel with me. We leave by the fourth hour of the evening. My people will bring you to the ship. I thank you. And I thank you, Tenar!” he said, taking her hand a moment, but no longer, for he had much to see to before he went.

When he came down to the wharf, late and hurrying, there was the slender hooded figure. The last horse to be led aboard was snorting and bracing its feet, refusing to go up the gangplank. Tehanu seemed to be conferring with the handler. Presently she took the horse’s bridle and talked to it a little, and they went up the gangplank quietly together.

Ships are small, crowded houses; Lebannen heard two of the hostlers talking softly on the afterdeck towards midnight. “She has the true hand,” one said, and the other, a younger voice, “Aye, she does, but she’s horrible to look at, ain’t she?” The first one said, “If a horse don’t mind it, why should you?” and the other, “I don’t know, but I do.”

Now, as they rode from the Onneva sands into the foothills, where the way widened, Tosla brought his horse up beside Lebannen’s. “She’s to be our interpreter, is she?” he asked.

“If she can.”

“Well, she’s braver than I’d have thought. If that happened to her the first time she talked with a dragon, it’s likely to happen again.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was half burnt to death.”

“Not by a dragon.”

“Who then?”

“The people she was born to.”

“How was that?” Tosla asked with a grimace.

“Tramps, thieves. She was five or six years old. Whatever she did or they did, it ended in her being beaten unconscious and shoved into their campfire. Thinking, I suppose, she was dead or would die and it would be taken for an accident. They made off. Villagers found her, and Tenar took her in.”

Tosla scratched his ear. “There’s a pretty tale of human kindness. So she’s no daughter of the old Archmage either? But then what do they mean saying she’s a dragon’s get?”

Lebannen had sailed with Tosla, had fought beside him years ago in the siege of Sorra, and knew him a brave, keen, coolheaded man. When Tosla’s coarseness chafed him he blamed his own thin skin. “I don’t know what they mean,” he answered mildly. “All I know is, the dragon called her daughter.”

“That Roke wizard of yours, that Onyx, is quick to say he’s no use in this matter. But he can speak the Old Tongue, can’t he?”

“Yes. He could wither you into ash with a few words of it. If he hasn’t it’s out of respect for me, not you, I think.”

Tosla nodded. “I know that,” he said.

They rode all that day at as quick a pace as the horses could keep, coming at nightfall to a little hill town where the horses could be fed and rested and the riders could sleep in variously uncomfortable beds. Those of them unused to riding now discovered they could barely walk. The people there had heard nothing about dragons, and were overwhelmed only by the terror and glory of a whole party of rich strangers riding in and wanting oats and beds and paying for them with silver and gold.

The riders set off again long before dawn. It was nearly a hundred miles from the sands of Onneva to Resbel. This second day would take them over the low pass of the Faliern Mountains and down the western side. Yenay, one of Lebannen’s most trusted officers, rode well ahead of the others; Tosla was rear guard; Lebannen led the main group. He was jogging along half asleep in the dull quiet before dawn when hoofbeats coming towards him woke him. Yenay had come riding back. Lebannen looked up where the man was pointing.

They had just emerged from woods on the crest of an open hillside and could see through the clear half light all the way to the pass. The mountains to either side of it massed black against the dull reddish glow of a cloudy dawn.

But they were looking west.

“That’s nearer than Resbel,” Yenay said. “Fifteen miles, maybe.”

Tehanu’s mare, though small, was the finest of the lot, and had a strong conviction that she should lead the others. If Tehanu didn’t hold her back she would keep sidling and overtaking till she was ahead of the line. The mare came up at once when Lebannen reined in his big horse, and so Tehanu was beside him now, looking where he looked.

“The forest is burning,” he said to her.

He could see only the scarred side of her face, so she seemed to gaze blindly; but she saw, and her claw hand that held the reins was trembling. The burned child fears the fire, he thought.

What cruel, cowardly folly had possessed him to tell this girl, “Come talk to the dragons, save my skin!” and bring her straight into the fire?

“We will turn back,” he said.

Tehanu raised her good hand, pointing. “Look,” she said. “Look!”

A spark from a bonfire, a burning cinder rising over the black line of the pass, an eagle of flame soaring, a dragon flying straight at them.

Tehanu stood up in her stirrups and let out a piercing, scraping cry, like a sea bird’s or a hawk’s scream, but it was a word, one word:
“Medeu!”

The great creature drew nearer with terrible speed, its long, thin wings beating almost lazily; it had lost the reflection of fire and looked black or bronze-colored in the growing light.

“Mind your horses,” Tehanu said in her cracked voice, and just then Lebannen’s grey gelding saw the dragon and started violently, tossing its head and backing. He could control it, but behind him one of the other horses let out a neigh of terror, and he heard them trampling and the handlers’ voices. The wizard Onyx came running up and stood beside Lebannen’s horse. Mounted or afoot, they stood and watched the dragon come.

Again Tehanu cried out that word. The dragon veered in its flight, slowed, came on, stopped and hovered in the air about fifty feet from them.

“Medeu!”
Tehanu called, and the answer came like an echo prolonged:
“Me-de-uuu!”

“What does it mean?” Lebannen asked, bending to Onyx.

“Sister, brother,” the wizard whispered.

Tehanu was off her horse, had tossed the reins to Yenay, was walking forward down the slight slope to where the dragon hovered, its long wings beating quick and short like a hovering hawk’s. But these wings were fifty feet from tip to tip, and as they beat they made a sound like kettledrums or rattles of brass. As she came closer to it, a little curl of fire escaped from the dragon’s long, long-toothed, open mouth.

She held up her hand. Not the slender brown hand but the burned one, the claw. The scarring of her arm and shoulder kept her from raising it fully. She could reach barely as high as her head.

The dragon sank a little in the air, lowered its head, and touched her hand with its lean, flared, scaled snout. Like a dog, an animal greeting and sniffing, Lebannen thought; like a falcon stooping to the wrist; like a king bowing to a queen.

Tehanu spoke, the dragon spoke, both briefly, in their cymbal-shiver voices. Another exchange, a pause; the dragon spoke at length. Onyx listened intently. One more exchange of words. A wisp of smoke from the dragon’s nostrils; a stiff, imperious gesture of the woman’s crippled, withered hand. She spoke clearly two words.

“Bring her,” the wizard translated in a whisper.

The dragon beat its wings hard, lowered its long head, and hissed, spoke again, then sprang up into the air, high over Tehanu, turned, wheeled once, and set off like an arrow to the west.

“It called her Daughter of the Eldest,” the wizard whispered, as Tehanu stood motionless, watching the dragon go.

She turned around, looking small and fragile in that great sweep of hill and forest in the grey dawn light. Lebannen swung off his horse and hurried forward to her. He thought to find her drained and terrified, he put out his hand to help her walk, but she smiled at him. Her face, half terrible half beautiful, shone with the red light of the unrisen sun.

“They won’t strike again. They will wait in the mountains,” she said.

Then indeed she looked around as if she did not know where she was, and when Lebannen took her arm she let him do so; but the fire and the smile lingered in her face, and she walked lightly.

While the hostlers held the horses, already grazing on the dew-wet grass, Onyx, Tosla, and Yenay came round her, though they kept a respectful distance. Onyx said, “My Lady Tehanu, I have never seen so brave an act.”

“Nor I,” Tosla said.

“I was afraid,” Tehanu said, in her voice that carried no emotion. “But I called him brother, and he called me sister.”

“I could not understand all you said,” the wizard said. “I have no such knowledge of the Old Speech as you. Will you tell us what passed between you?”

She spoke slowly, her eyes on the west where the dragon had flown. The dull red of the distant fire was paling as the east grew bright. “I said, ‘Why are you burning the king’s island?’ And he said, ‘It is time we have our own lands again.’ And I said, ‘Did the Eldest bid you take them with fire?’ Then he said that the Eldest, Kalessin, had gone with Orm Irian beyond the west to fly on the other wind. And he said the young dragons who remained here on the winds of the world say men are oath breakers who stole the dragons’ lands. They tell one another that Kalessin will never return, and they will wait no longer, but will drive men out of all the western lands. But lately Orm Irian has returned, and is on Paln, he said. And I told him to ask her to come. And he said she would come to Kalessin’s daughter.”

F
ROM THE WINDOW OF HER
room in the palace Tenar had watched the ship sail, carrying Lebannen and her daughter away into the night. She had not gone down to the wharf with Tehanu. It had been hard, very hard to refuse to come with her on this journey. Tehanu had begged, she who never asked for anything. She never cried, could not cry, but her breath had caught sobbing: “But I can’t go, I
can’t
go alone! Come with me, mother!”

“My love, my heart, if I could spare you this fear I would, don’t you see I can’t? I’ve done what I could do for you, my flame of fire, my star. The king is right—only you, you alone, can do this.”

“But if you were just there, so I knew you were there—”

“I’m here, I’m always here. What could I do there but be a burden? You must travel fast, it will be a hard journey. I’d hold you back. And you might fear for me. You don’t need me. I’m no use to you. You must learn that. You must go, Tehanu.”

And she had turned away from her child and begun sorting out the clothing Tehanu should take, home clothes, not the fancy things they wore here in the palace: her stout shoes, her good cloak. If she wept while she did it, she did not let her daughter see it.

Tehanu stood as if bewildered, paralysed with fear. When Tenar gave her clothes to change into, she obeyed. When the king’s lieutenant, Yenay, knocked and asked if he might conduct Mistress Tehanu down to the wharf, she stared at him like a dumb animal.