The Other Wind (21 page)

“That would be the blind man who led the seers to the cliff’s edge, indeed!” Alder said with a laugh.

“Ah, but we’re at the cliff’s edge already, with our eyes shut,” said the wizard of Paln.

***

L
EBANNEN FOUND THE SHIP TOO
small to contain the enormous restlessness that filled him. The women sat under their little awning and the wizards sat under theirs like ducks in a row, but he paced up and down, impatient with the narrow confines of the deck. He felt it was his impatience and not the wind that sent
Dolphin
running so fast to the south, but never fast enough. He wanted the journey over.

“Remember the fleet on the way to Wathort?” Tosla said, joining him while he stood near the steersman, studying the chart and the clear sea before them. “That was a grand sight. Thirty ships aline!”

“I wish it was Wathort we were bound for,” Lebannen said.

“I never did like Roke,” Tosla agreed. “Not an honest wind or current for twenty miles off that shore, but only wizards’ brew. And the rocks north of it never in the same place twice. And the town full of cheats and shape-shifters.” He spat, competently, to leeward. “I’d rather meet old Gore and his slavers again!”

Lebannen nodded, but said nothing. That was often the pleasure of Tosla’s company: he said what Lebannen felt it was better that he himself not say.

“Who was the dumb man, the mute,” Tosla asked, “the one that killed Falcon on the wall?”

“Egre. Pirate turned slave taker.”

“That’s it. He knew you, there at Sorra. Went right for you. I always wondered how.”

“Because he took me as a slave once.”

It was not easy to surprise Tosla, but the seaman looked at him with his mouth open, evidently not believing him but not able to say so, and so with nothing to say. Lebannen enjoyed the effect for a minute and then took pity on him.

“When the Archmage took me hunting after Cob, we went south, first. A man in Hort Town betrayed us to the slave takers. They knocked the Archmage on the head, and I ran off thinking I could lead them away from him. But it was me they were after—I was salable. I woke up chained in a galley bound for Sowl. He rescued me before the next night passed. The irons fell off us all like bits of dead leaves. And he told Egre not to speak again until he found something worth saying . . . He came to that galley like a great light over the water . . . I never knew what he was till then.”

Tosla mulled this over a while. “He unchained all the slaves? Why didn’t the others kill Egre?”

“Maybe they took him on to Sowl and sold him,” Lebannen said.

Tosla mulled a while longer. “So that’s why you were so keen to do away with the slave trade.”

“One reason.”

“Doesn’t improve the character, as a rule,” Tosla observed. He studied the chart of the Inmost Sea tacked on the board to the steersman’s left. “Island of Way,” he remarked. “Where the dragon woman’s from.”

“You keep clear of her, I notice.”

Tosla pursed his lips, though he did not whistle, being aboard ship. “You know that song I mentioned, about the Lass of Belilo? Well, I never thought of it as anything but a tale. Until I saw her.”

“I doubt she’d eat you, Tosla.”

“It would be a glorious death,” the sailor said, rather sourly.

The king laughed.

“Don’t push your own luck,” said Tosla.

“No fear.”

“You and she were talking there so free and easy. Like making yourself easy with a volcano, to my mind . . . But I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit more of that present the Kargs sent you. There’s a sight worth seeing in there, to judge by the feet. But how do you get it out of the tent? The feet are grand, but I’d like a bit more ankle, to begin with.”

Lebannen felt his face turn grim, and turned aside to keep Tosla from seeing it.

“If anybody gave me a package like that,” Tosla said, staring out over the sea, “I’d open it.”

Lebannen could not restrain a slight movement of impatience. Tosla saw it; he was quick. He grinned his wry grin and said no more.

The ship’s master had come out on deck, and Lebannen engaged him in talk. “Looks a bit thick ahead?” he said, and the master nodded: “Thunder squalls to the south and west there. We’ll be in them tonight.”

The sea grew choppier as the afternoon drew on, the benign sunlight took on a brassy tinge, and gusts of wind blew from one quarter then another. Tenar had told Lebannen that the princess was afraid of the sea and of seasickness, and he glanced back once or twice at the aftercabin, expecting to see no red-veiled form among the ducks in a row. But it was Tenar and Tehanu who had gone in; the princess was still there, and Irian was sitting beside her. They were talking earnestly. What on earth did a dragon woman from Way have to talk about with a harem woman from Hur-at-Hur? What language had they in common? The question seemed so much in need of answering to Lebannen that he walked aft.

When he got there Irian looked up at him and smiled. She had a strong, open face, a broad smile; she went barefoot by choice, was careless about her dress, let the wind tangle her hair; altogether she seemed no more than a handsome, hothearted, intelligent, untaught countrywoman, till you saw her eyes. They were the color of smoky amber, and when she looked straight at Lebannen, as she was doing now, he could not meet them. He looked down.

He had made it clear that there was to be no courtly ceremony on the ship, no bows and courtesies, nobody was to leap up when he came near; but the princess had got to her feet. They were, as Tosla had observed, beautiful feet, not small, but high-arched, strong, and fine. He looked at them, the two slender feet on the white wood of the deck. He looked up from them and saw that the princess was doing as she had done the last time he faced her: parting her veils so that he, though no one else, could see her face. He was a little staggered by the stern, almost tragic beauty of the face in that red shadow.

“Is—is everything all right, princess?” he asked, stammering, a thing he very seldom did.

She said, “My friend Tenar said, breathe wind.”

“Yes,” he said, rather at random.

“Is there anything your wizards could do for her, do you think, maybe?” said Irian, unfolding her long limbs and standing up too. She and the princess were both tall women.

Lebannen was trying to make out what color the princess’s eyes were, since he was able to look at them. They were blue, he thought, but like blue opals they held other colors in them, or maybe it was the sunlight coming through the red of her veils.—“Do for her?”

“She wants very much not to be seasick. She had a terrible time of it coming from the Kargish places.”

“I will not to fear,” the princess said. She gazed straight at him as if challenging him to—what?

“Of course,” he said, “of course. I’ll ask Onyx. I’m sure there’s something he can do.” He made a sketchy bow to them both and went off hurriedly to find the wizard.

Onyx and Seppel conferred and then consulted Alder. A spell against seasickness was more in the province of sorcerers, menders, healers, than of learned and powerful wizards. Alder could not do anything himself at present, of course, but he might remember a charm . . . ? He did not, having never dreamed of going to sea until his troubles began. Seppel confessed that he himself always got seasick in small boats or rough weather. Onyx finally went to the aftercabin and begged the princess’s pardon: he himself had no skill to help her, and nothing to offer her but—apologetically—a charm or talisman one of the sailors hearing of her plight—the sailors heard everything—had pressed upon him to give her.

The princess’s long-fingered hand emerged from the red and gold veils. The wizard placed in it a queer little black-and-white object: dried seaweed braided round a bird’s breastbone. “A petrel, because they ride the storm,” Onyx said, shamefaced.

The princess bowed her unseen head and murmured thanks in Kargish. The fetish disappeared within her veils. She withdrew to the cabin. Onyx, meeting the king quite nearby, apologised to him. The ship was pitching energetically now in hard, erratic gusts on a choppy sea, and he said, “I could, you know, sire, say a word to the winds . . .”

Lebannen knew well that there were two schools of thought concerning weatherworking: the old-fashioned one, that of the Bagmen who ordered the winds to serve their ships as shepherds order their dogs to run here and there, and the newfangled notion—a few centuries old at most—of the Roke School, that the magewind might be raised at real need, but it was best to let the world’s winds blow. He knew that Onyx was a devout upholder of the way of Roke. “Use your own judgment, Onyx,” he said. “If it seems we’re in for a really bad night . . . But if it’s no more than a few squalls . . .”

Onyx looked up at the masthead, where already a wisp or two of fallow fire had flickered in the cloud-darkened dusk. Thunder rumbled grandly in the blackness before them, all across the south. Behind them the last of the daylight fell wan, tremulous across the waves. “Very well,” he said, rather dismally, and went below to the small and crowded cabin.

Lebannen stayed out of that cabin almost entirely, sleeping on deck when he slept at all. Tonight was not one for sleep for anybody on the
Dolphin.
It was not a single squall, but a chain of violent late-summer storms boiling up out of the southwest, and between the terrific commotion of the lightning-dazzled sea, the thunder crashes that seemed about to knock the ship apart, and the crazy storm gusts that kept her pitching and rolling and taking queer jumps, it was a long night and a loud one.

Onyx consulted Lebannen once: Should he say a word to the wind? Lebannen looked to the master, who shrugged. He and his crew were busy enough, but unconcerned. The ship was in no trouble. As for the womenfolk, they were reported to be sitting up in their cabin, gambling. Irian and the princess had come out on deck earlier, but it was hard to stay afoot at times and they had seen they were in the crew’s way, so they had retired. The report that they were gambling came from the cook’s boy, who had been sent to see if they wanted anything to eat. They had wanted whatever he could bring.

Lebannen found himself possessed by the same intense curiosity he had felt in the afternoon. There was no doubt the lamps were all alight in the stern cabin, for the glow of them streamed out golden on the foam and race of the ship’s wake. About midnight, he went aft and knocked.

Irian opened the door. After the dazzle and blackness of the storm the lamplight in the cabin seemed warm and steady, though the swinging lamps cast swinging shadows; and he was confusedly aware of colors, the soft, various colors of the women’s clothes, their skin, brown or pale or gold, their hair, black or grey or tawny, their eyes—the princess’s eyes staring at him, startled, as she snatched up a scarf or some cloth to hold before her face.

“Oh! We thought it was the cook’s boy!” Irian said with a laugh.

Tehanu looked at him and said in her shy, comradely way, “Is there trouble?”

He realised that he was standing in the doorway staring at them like some speechless messenger of doom.

“No—None at all—Are you getting on all right? I’m sorry it’s been so rough—”

“We don’t hold you answerable for the weather,” Tenar said. “Nobody could sleep, so the princess and I have been teaching the others Kargish gambling.”

He saw five-sided ivory dice-sticks scattered over the table, probably Tosla’s.

“We’ve been betting islands,” Irian said. “But Tehanu and I are losing. The Kargs have already won Ark and Ilien.”

The princess had lowered the scarf; she sat facing Lebannen resolutely, extremely tense, as a young swordsman might face him before a fencing match. In the warmth of the cabin they were all bare-armed and barefoot, but her consciousness of her uncovered face drew his consciousness as a magnet draws a pin.

“I’m sorry it’s been so rough,” he said again, idiotically, and closed the door. As he turned away he heard them all laughing.

He went to stand by the steersman. Looking into the gusty, rainy darkness lit by fitful, distant lightning, he could still see everything in the stern cabin, the black fall of Tehanu’s hair, Tenar’s affectionate, teasing smile, the dice on the table, the princess’s round arms, honey-colored like the lamplight, her throat in the shadow of her hair, though he did not remember looking at her arms and throat but only at her face, at her eyes full of defiance, despair. What was the girl afraid of? Did she think he wanted to hurt her?

A star or two was shining out high in the south. He went to his crowded cabin, slung a hammock, for the bunks were full, and slept for a few hours. He woke before dawn, restless as ever, and went up on deck.

The day came as bright and calm as if no storm had ever been. Lebannen stood at the forward rail and saw the first sunlight strike across the water, and an old song came into his mind:

      O my joy!
Before bright Éa was, before Segoy
      Bade the islands be,

The morning wind blew on the sea.
     O my joy, be free!

It was a fragment of a ballad or lullaby from his childhood. He could remember no more of it. The tune was sweet. He sang it softly and let the wind take the words from his lips.

Tenar emerged from the cabin and, seeing him, came to him. “Good morning, my dear lord,” she said, and he greeted her fondly, with some memory that he had been angry at her but not knowing why he had been or how he could have been.

“Did you Kargs win Havnor last night?” he asked.

“No, you may keep Havnor. We went to bed. All the young ones are still there, lolling. Shall we—what is it? lift Roke today?”

“Raise Roke? No, not till early tomorrow. But before noon we should be in Thwil Harbor. If they let us come to the island.”

“What do you mean?”

“Roke defends itself from unwelcome visitors.”

“Oh: Ged told me about that. He was on a ship trying to sail back there, and they sent the wind against him, the Roke wind he called it.”

“Against
him?
”