The Other Wind (16 page)

A lunch of fresh cheese and summer fruits and greens was set out in a room in Queen Heru’s Tower. There Lebannen invited Tehanu and Tenar, Alder, Sege, and Onyx; and Onyx, with the king’s permission, brought with him the Pelnish wizard Seppel. They sat and ate together, talking little and quietly. The windows looked over all the harbor and the north shoreline of the bay fading off into a bluish haze that might be either the remnants of the morning fog or smoke from the forest fires in the west of the island.

Alder remained bewildered at being included among the king’s intimates and brought into his councils. What had he to do with dragons? He could neither fight with them nor talk with them. The idea of such mighty beings was great and strange to him. At moments the boasts and challenges of the councillors seemed to him like a yapping of dogs. He had seen a young dog once on a beach barking and barking at the ocean, rushing and snapping at the ebb wave, running back from the breaker with its wet tail between its legs.

But he was glad to be with Tenar, who put him at ease, and whom he liked for her kindness and courage, and he found now that he was also at ease with Tehanu.

Her disfigurement made it seem that she had two faces. He could not see them both at one time, only the one or the other. But he had got used to that and it did not disquiet him. His mother’s face had been half masked by its wine-red birthmark. Tehanu’s face reminded him of that.

She seemed less restless and troubled than she had been. She sat quietly, and a couple of times she spoke to Alder, sitting next to her, with a shy comradeliness. He felt that, like him, she was there not by choice but because she had forgone choice, driven to follow a way she did not understand. Maybe her way and his went together, for a while at least. The idea gave him courage. Knowing only that there was something he had to do, something begun that must be finished, he felt that whatever it might be, it would be better done with her than without her. Perhaps she was drawn to him out of the same loneliness.

But her conversation was not of such deep matters. “My father gave you a kitten,” she said to him as they left the table. “Was it one of Aunty Moss’s?”

He nodded, and she asked, “The grey one?”

“Yes.”

“That was the best cat of the litter.”

“She’s getting fat, here.”

Tehanu hesitated and then said timidly, “I think it’s a he.”

Alder found himself smiling. “He’s a good companion. A sailor named him Tug.”

“Tug,” she said, and looked satisfied.

“Tehanu,” the king said. He had sat down beside Tenar in the deep window seat. “I didn’t call on you in council today to speak of the questions Lord Sparrowhawk asked you. It was not the time. Is it the place?”

Alder watched her. She considered before answering. She glanced once at her mother, who made no answering sign.

“I’d rather speak to you here,” she said in her hoarse voice. “And maybe to the Princess of Hur-at-Hur.”

After a brief pause the king said pleasantly, “Shall I send for her?”

“No, I can go see her. Afterward. I haven’t much to say, really. My father asked,
Who goes to the dry land when they die?
And my mother and I talked about it. And we thought, people go there, but do the beasts? Do birds fly there? Are there trees, does the grass grow? Alder, you’ve seen it.”

Taken by surprise, he could say only, “There . . . there’s grass, on the hither side of the wall, but it seems dead. Beyond that I don’t know.”

Tehanu looked at the king. “You walked across that land, my lord.”

“I saw no beast, or bird, or growing thing.”

Alder spoke again: “Lord Sparrowhawk said: dust, rock.”

“I think no beings go there at death but human beings,” Tehanu said. “But not all of them.” Again she looked at her mother, and did not look away.

Tenar spoke. “The Kargish people are like the animals.” Her voice was dry and let no feeling be heard. “They die to be reborn.”

“That is superstition,” Onyx said. “Forgive me, Lady Tenar, but you yourself—” He paused.

“I no longer believe,” Tenar said, “that I am or was, as they told me, Arha forever reborn, a single soul reincarnated endlessly and so immortal. I do believe that when I die I will, like any mortal being, rejoin the greater being of the world. Like the grass, the trees, the animals. Men are only animals that speak, sir, as you said this morning.”

“But we can speak the Language of the Making,” the wizard protested. “By learning the words by which Segoy made the world, the very speech of life, we teach our souls to conquer death.”

“That place where nothing is but dust and shadows, is that your conquest?” Her voice was not dry now, and her eyes flashed.

Onyx stood indignant but wordless.

The king intervened. “Lord Sparrowhawk asked a second question,” he said.
“Can a dragon cross the wall of stones?”
He looked at Tehanu.

“It’s answered in the first answer,” she said, “if dragons are only animals that speak, and animals don’t go there. Has a mage ever seen a dragon there? Or you, my lord?” She looked first at Onyx, then at Lebannen. Onyx pondered only a moment before he said, “No.”

The king looked amazed. “How is it I never thought of that?” he said. “No, we saw none. I think there are no dragons there.”

“My lord,” Alder said, louder than he had ever said anything in the palace, “there is a dragon here.” He was standing facing the window, and he pointed at it.

They all turned. In the sky above the Bay of Havnor they saw a dragon flying from the west. Its long, slow-beating, vaned wings shone red-gold. A curl of smoke drifted behind it for a moment in the hazy summer air.

“Now,” the king said, “what room do I make ready for this guest?”

He spoke as if amused, bemused. But the instant he saw the dragon turn and come wheeling in towards the Tower of the Sword, he ran from the room and down the stairs, startling and outstripping the guards in the halls and at the doors, so that he came out first and alone on the terrace under the white tower.

The terrace was the roof of a banquet hall, a wide expanse of marble with a low balustrade, the Sword Tower rising directly over it and the Queen’s Tower nearby. The dragon had alighted on the pavement and was furling its wings with a loud metallic rattle as the king came out. Where it came down its talons had scratched grooves in the marble.

The long, gold-mailed head swung round. The dragon looked at the king.

The king looked down and did not meet its eyes. But he stood straight and spoke clearly. “Orm Irian, welcome. I am Lebannen.”

“Agni Lebannen,”
said the great hissing voice, greeting him as Orm Embar had greeted him long ago, in the farthest west, before he was a king.

Behind him, Onyx and Tehanu had run out onto the terrace along with several guards. One guard had his sword out, and Lebannen saw, in a window of the Queen’s Tower, another with drawn bow and notched arrow aimed at the dragon’s breast. “Put down your weapons!” he shouted in a voice that made the towers ring, and the guard obeyed in such haste that he nearly dropped his sword, but the archer lowered his bow reluctantly, finding it hard to leave his lord defenseless.

“Medeu,”
Tehanu whispered, coming up beside Lebannen, her gaze unwavering on the dragon. The great creature’s head swung round again and the immense amber eye in a socket of shining, wrinkled scales gazed back, unblinking.

The dragon spoke.

Onyx, understanding, murmured to the king what it said and what Tehanu replied. “Kalessin’s daughter, my sister,” it said. “You do not fly.”

“I cannot change, sister,” Tehanu said.

“Shall I?”

“For a while, if you will.”

Then those on the terrace and in the windows of the towers saw the strangest thing they might ever see however long they lived in a world of sorceries and wonders. They saw the dragon, the huge creature whose scaled belly and thorny tail dragged and stretched half across the breadth of the terrace, and whose red-horned head reared up twice the height of the king—they saw it lower that big head, and tremble so that its wings rattled like cymbals, and not smoke but a mist breathed out of its deep nostrils, clouding its shape, so that it became cloudy like thin fog or worn glass; and then it was gone. The midday sun beat down on the scored, scarred, white pavement. There was no dragon. There was a woman. She stood some ten paces from Tehanu and the king. She stood where the heart of the dragon might have been.

She was young, tall, and strongly built, dark, dark-haired, wearing a farm woman’s shift and trousers, barefoot. She stood motionless, as if bewildered. She looked down at her body. She lifted up her hand and looked at it. “The little thing!” she said, in the common speech, and she laughed. She looked at Tehanu. “It’s like putting on the shoes I wore when I was five,” she said.

The two women moved towards each other. With a certain stateliness, like that of armed warriors saluting or ships meeting at sea, they embraced. They held each other lightly, but for some moments. They drew apart, and both turned to face the king.

“Lady Irian,” he said, and bowed.

She looked a little nonplussed and made a kind of country curtsey. When she looked up he saw her eyes were the color of amber. He looked instantly away.

“I’ll do you no harm in this guise,” she said, with a broad, white smile. “Your majesty,” she added uncomfortably, trying to be polite.

He bowed again. It was he that was nonplussed now. He looked at Tehanu, and round at Tenar, who had come out onto the terrace with Alder. Nobody said anything.

Irian’s eyes went to Onyx, standing in his grey cloak just behind the king, and her face lighted up again. “Sir,” she said, “are you from Roke Island? Do you know the Lord Patterner?”

Onyx bowed or nodded. He too kept his eyes from hers.

“Is he well? Does he walk among his trees?”

Again the wizard bowed.

“And the Doorkeeper, and the Herbal, and Kurremkarmerruk? They befriended me, they stood by me. If you go back there, greet them with my love and honor, if you please.”

“I will,” the wizard said.

“My mother is here,” Tehanu said softly to Irian. “Tenar of Atuan.”

“Tenar of Gont,” Lebannen said, with a certain ring to his voice.

Looking with open wonder at Tenar, Irian said, “It was you that brought the Rune Ring from the land of the Hoary Men, along with the Archmage?”

“It was,” Tenar said, staring with equal frankness at Irian.

Above them on the balcony that encircled the Tower of the Sword near its summit there was movement: the trumpeters had come out to sound the hour, but at the moment all four of them were gathered on the south side overlooking the terrace, peering down to see the dragon. There were faces in every window of the palace towers, and the thrum of voices down in the streets could be heard like a tide coming in.

“When they sound the first hour,” Lebannen said, “the council will gather again. The councillors will have seen you come, my lady, or heard of your coming. So if it please you, I think it best that we go straight among them and let them behold you. And if you’ll speak to them I promise you they’ll listen.”

“Very well,” Irian said. For a moment there was a ponderous, reptilian impassivity in her. When she moved, that vanished, and she seemed only a tall young woman who stepped forward quite awkwardly, saying with a smile to Tehanu, “I feel as if I’ll float up like a spark, there’s no weight to me!”

The four trumpets up in the tower sounded to west, north, east, south in turn, one phrase of the lament a king five hundred years ago had made for the death of his friend.

For a moment the king now remembered the face of that man, Erreth-Akbe, as he stood on the beach of Selidor, dark-eyed, sorrowful, mortally wounded, among the bones of the dragon who had killed him. Lebannen felt it strange that he should think of such faraway things at such a moment; and yet it was not strange, for the living and the dead, men and dragons, all were drawing together to some event he could not see.

He paused until Irian and Tehanu came up to him. As he walked on into the palace with them he said, “Lady Irian, there are many things I would ask you, but what my people fear and what the council will desire to know is whether your people intend to make war on us, and why.”

She nodded, a heavy, decisive nod. “I will tell them what I know.”

When they came to the curtained doorway behind the dais, the throne room was all in confusion, an uproar of voices, so that the crash of Prince Sege’s staff was barely heard at first. Then silence came suddenly on them and they all turned to see the king come in with the dragon.

Lebannen did not sit but stood before the throne, and Irian stood to his left.

“Hear the king,” Sege said into that dead silence.

The king said, “Councillors! This is a day that will long be told and sung. Your sons’ daughters and your daughters’ sons will say, ‘I am the grandchild of one who was of the Dragon Council!’ So honor her whose presence honors us. Hear Orm Irian.”

Some of those who were at the Dragon Council said afterwards that if they looked straight at her she seemed only a tall woman standing there, but if they looked aside what they saw in the corner of their eye was a vast shimmer of smoky gold that dwarfed king and throne. And many of them, knowing a man must not look into a dragon’s eye, did look aside; but they stole glimpses too. The women looked at her, some thinking her plain, some beautiful, some pitying her for having to go barefoot in the palace. And a few councillors, not having rightly understood, wondered who the woman was, and when the dragon would be coming.

All the time she spoke, that complete silence endured. Though her voice had the lightness of most women’s voices, it filled the high hall easily. She spoke slowly and formally, as if she were translating in her mind from the older speech.

“My name was Irian, of the Domain of Old Iria on Way. I am Orm Irian now. Kalessin, the Eldest, calls me daughter. I am sister to Orm Embar, whom the king knew, and grandchild of Orm, who killed the king’s companion Erreth-Akbe and was killed by him. I am here because my sister Tehanu called to me.