The Farthest Shore (12 page)

The houses were curious, with little windows set randomly, and thatches of hurbah-twigs, all green with moss and lichens. It had been a wealthy isle, as isles of the Reach go, and this was still
to be seen in the well-painted and well-furnished houses, in the great spinning wheels and looms in the cottages and worksheds, and in the stone piers of the little harbor of Sosara, where several trading galleys might have docked. But there were no galleys in the harbor. The paint on the houses was faded, there was no new furniture, and most of the wheels and looms were still, with dust on them, and spiderwebs between pedal and pedal, between warp and frame.

“Sorcerers?” said the mayor of Sosara village, a short man with a face as hard and brown as the soles of his bare feet. “There’s no sorcerers in Lorbanery. Nor ever was.”

“Who’d have thought it?” said Sparrowhawk admiringly. He was sitting with eight or nine of the villagers, drinking hurbah-berry wine, a thin and bitter vintage. He had of necessity told them that he was in the South Reach hunting emmelstone, but he had in no way disguised himself or his companion, except that Arren had left his sword hidden in the boat, as usual, and if Sparrowhawk had his staff about him it was not to be seen. The villagers had been sullen and hostile at first and were disposed to turn sullen and hostile again at any moment; only Sparrowhawk’s adroitness and authority had forced a grudging acceptance from them. “Wonderful men with trees you must have here,” he said now. “What do they do about a late frost on the orchards?”

“Nothing,” said a skinny man at the end of the row of villagers. They all sat in a line with their backs against the inn wall, under
the eaves of the thatch. Just past their bare feet the large, soft rain of April pattered on the earth.

“Rain’s the peril, not frost,” the mayor said. “Rots the worm cases. No man’s going to stop rain falling. Nor ever did.” He was belligerent about sorcerers and sorcery; some of the others seemed more wistful on the subject. “Never did used to rain this time of year,” one of them said, “when the old fellow was alive.”

“Who? Old Mildi? Well, he’s not alive. He’s dead,” said the mayor.

“Used to call him the Orcharder,” the skinny man said. “Aye. Called him the Orcharder,” said another one. Silence descended, like the rain.

Inside the window of the one-roomed inn Arren sat. He had found an old lute hung on the wall, a long-necked, three-stringed lute such as they play in the Isle of Silk, and he was playing with it now, learning to draw its music from it, not much louder than the patter of the rain on the thatch.

“In the markets in Hort Town,” said Sparrowhawk, “I saw stuff sold as silk of Lorbanery. Some of it was silk. But none of it was silk of Lorbanery.”

“The seasons have been poor,” said the skinny man. “Four years, five years now.”

“Five years it is since Fallows Eve,” said an old man in a munching, self-satisfied voice, “since old Mildi died, aye, die he did, and not near the age I am. Died on Fallows Eve he did.”

“Scarcity puts up the prices,” said the mayor. “For one bolt of semi-fine blue-dyed we get now what we used to get for three bolts.”

“If we get it. Where’s the ships? And the blue’s false,” said the skinny man, thus bringing on a half-hour argument concerning the quality of the dyes they used in the great worksheds.

“Who makes the dyes?” Sparrowhawk asked, and a new hassle broke out. The upshot of it was that the whole process of dyeing had been overseen by a family who, in fact, called themselves wizards; but if they ever had been wizards they had lost their art, and nobody else had found it, as the skinny man remarked sourly. For they all agreed, except the mayor, that the famous blue dyes of Lorbanery and the unmatchable crimson, the “dragon’s fire” worn by queens in Havnor long ago, were not what they had been. Something had gone out of them. The unseasonable rains were at fault, or the dye-earths, or the refiners. “Or the eyes,” said the skinny man, “of men who couldn’t tell the true azure from blue mud,” and he glared at the mayor. The mayor did not take up the challenge; they fell silent again.

The thin wine seemed only to acidify their tempers, and their faces looked glum. There was no sound now but the rustle of rain on the uncountable leaves of the orchards of the valley, and the whisper of the sea down at the end of the street, and the murmur of the lute in the darkness within doors.

“Can he sing, that girlish lad of yours?” asked the mayor.

“Aye, he can sing. Arren! Sing a measure for us, lad.”

“I cannot get this lute to play out of the minor,” said Arren at the window, smiling. “It wants to weep. What would you hear, my hosts?”

“Something new,” growled the mayor.

The lute thrilled a little; he had the touch of it already. “This might be new here,” he said. Then he sang.

By the white straits of Soléa

and the bowed red branches

that bent their blossoms over

her bowed head, heavy

with sorrow for the lost lover,

by the red branch and the white branch

and the sorrow unceasing

do I swear, Serriadh,

son of my mother and of Morred,

to remember the wrong done

forever, forever.

They were still: the bitter faces and the shrewd, the hard-worked hands and bodies. They sat still in the warm rainy Southern dusk, and heard that song like the cry of the grey swan of the cold seas of Eá, yearning, bereft. For a while after the song was over they kept still.

“That’s a queer music,” said one, uncertainly.

Another, reassured as to the absolute centrality of the isle of Lorbanery in all time and space, said, “Foreign music’s always queer and gloomy.”

“Give us some of yours,” said Sparrowhawk. “I’d like to hear a cheery stave myself. The lad will always sing of old dead heroes.”

“I’ll do that,” said the last speaker, and hemmed a bit, and started out to sing about a lusty, trusty barrel of wine, and a hey, ho, and about we go! But nobody joined him in the chorus, and he went flat on the hey, ho.

“There’s no more proper singing,” he said angrily. “It’s the young people’s fault, always chopping and changing the way things are done, and not learning the old songs.”

“It’s not that,” said the skinny man. “There’s no more proper anything. Nothing goes right anymore.”

“Aye, aye, aye,” wheezed the oldest one, “the luck’s run out. That’s what. The luck’s run out.”

After that there was not much to say. The villagers departed by twos and threes, until Sparrowhawk was left alone outside the window and Arren inside it. And then Sparrowhawk laughed, at last. But it was not a merry laugh.

The innkeeper’s shy wife came and spread out beds for them on the floor and went away, and they lay down to sleep. But the high rafters of the room were an abode of bats. In and out the unglazed window the bats flew all night long, chittering very high. Only
at dawn did they all return and settle, each composing itself in a little, neat, grey package hanging from a rafter upside down.

Perhaps it was the restlessness of the bats that made Arren’s sleep uneasy. It was many nights now since he had slept ashore; his body was not used to the immobility of earth and insisted to him as he fell asleep that he was rocking, rocking . . . and then the world would fall out from underneath him and he would wake with a great start. When at last he got to sleep, he dreamt he was chained in the hold of the slaver’s ship; there were others chained with him, but they were all dead. He woke from this dream more than once, struggling to get free of it, but falling to sleep at once reentered it. At last it seemed to him that he was all alone on the ship, but still chained so that he could not move. Then a curious, slow voice spoke in his ear. “Loose your bonds,” it said. “Loose your bonds.” He tried to move then, and moved: he stood up. He was on some vast, dim moor, under a heavy sky. There was horror in the earth and in the thick air, an enormity of horror. This place was fear, was fear itself; and he was in it, and there were no paths. He must find the way, but there were no paths, and he was tiny, like a child, like an ant, and the place was huge, endless. He tried to walk, stumbled, woke.

The fear was inside him, now that he was awake, and he was not inside it: yet it was no less huge and endless. He felt choked by the black darkness of the room, and looked for stars in the dim square that was the window, but though the rain had ceased there
were no stars. He lay awake and was afraid, and the bats flew in and out on noiseless leather wings. Sometimes he heard their thin voices at the very limit of his hearing.

The morning came bright, and they were up early. Sparrowhawk inquired earnestly for emmelstone. Though none of the townsfolk knew what emmelstone was, they all had theories about it and quarreled over them; and he listened, though he listened for news of something other than emmelstone. At last he and Arren took a way that the mayor suggested to them, toward the quarries where the blue dye-earth was dug. But on the way Sparrowhawk turned aside.

“This will be the house,” he said. “They said that that family of dyers and discredited magicians lives on this road.”

“Is it any use to talk to them?” said Arren, remembering Hare all too well.

“There is a center to this bad luck,” said the mage, harshly. “There is a place where the luck runs out. I need a guide to that place!” And he went on, and Arren must follow.

The house stood apart among its own orchards, a fine building of stone, but it and all its acreage had gone long uncared for. Cocoons of ungathered silkworms hung discolored among the ragged branches, and the ground beneath was thick with a papery litter of dead grubs and moths. All about the house under the close-set trees there hung an odor of decay, and as they came to it Arren suddenly remembered the horror that had been on him in the night.

Before they reached the door it was flung open. Out charged a grey-haired woman, glaring with reddened eyes and shouting, “Out, curse you, thieves, slanderers, lack-wits, liars, and misbegotten fools! Get out, out, go! The ill chance be on you forever!”

Sparrowhawk stopped, looking somewhat amazed, and quickly raised his hand in a curious gesture. He said one word, “Avert!”

At that the woman stopped yelling. She stared at him.

“Why did you do that?”

“To turn your Curse aside.”

She stared awhile longer and said at last, hoarsely, “Foreigners?”

“From the North.”

She came forward. At first Arren had been inclined to laugh at her, an old woman screeching on her doorstep, but close to her he felt only shame. She was foul and ill-clothed, and her breath stank, and her eyes had a terrible stare of pain.

“I have no power to curse,” she said. “No power.” She imitated Sparrowhawk’s gesture. “They still do that, where you come from?”

He nodded. He watched her steadily, and she returned his gaze. Presently her face began to work and change, and she said, “Where’s thy stick?”

“I do not show it here, sister.”

“No, you should not. It will keep you from life. Like my power: it kept me from life. So I lost it. I lost all the things I knew, all the words and names. They came by little strings like spiderwebs
out of my eyes and mouth. There is a hole in the world, and the light is running out of it. And the words go with the light. Did you know that? My son sits staring all day at the dark, looking for the hole in the world. He says he would see better if he were blind. He has lost his hand as a dyer. We were the Dyers of Lorbanery. Look!” She shook before them her muscular, thin arms, stained to the shoulder with a faint, streaky mixture of ineradicable dyes. “It never comes off the skin,” she said, “but the mind washes clean. It won’t hold the colors. Who are you?”

Sparrowhawk said nothing. Again his eyes held the woman’s; and Arren, standing aside, watched uneasily.

All at once she trembled and said in a whisper, “I know thee—”

“Aye. Like knows like, sister.”

It was strange to see how she pulled away from the mage in terror, wanting to flee him, and yearned toward him as if to kneel at his feet.

He took her hand and held her. “Would you have your power back, the skills, the names? I can give you that.”

“You are the Great Man,” she whispered. “You are the King of the Shadows, the Lord of the Dark Place—”

“I am not. I am no king. I am a man, a mortal, your brother and your like.”

“But you will not die?”

“I will.”

“But you will come back and live forever.”

“Not I. Nor any man.”

“Then you are not—not the Great One in the darkness,” she said, frowning, and looking at him a little askance, with less fear. “But you are a Great One. Are there two? What is your name?”

Sparrowhawk’s stern face softened a moment. “I cannot tell you that,” he said gently.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” she said. She stood straighter now, facing him, and there was the echo of an old dignity in her voice and bearing. “I do not want to live and live and live forever. I would rather have back the names of things. But they are all gone. Names don’t matter now. There are no more secrets. Do you want to know my name?” Her eyes filled with light, her fists clenched, she leaned forward and whispered: “My name is Akaren.” Then she screamed aloud, “Akaren! Akaren! My name is Akaren! Now they all know my secret name, my true name, and there are no secrets, and there is no truth, and there is no death—death—death!” She screamed the word sobbing, and spittle flew from her lips.

“Be still, Akaren!”

She was still. Tears ran down her face, which was dirty, and streaked with locks of her uncombed, grey hair.

Sparrowhawk took that wrinkled, tear-blubbered face between his hands and very lightly, very tenderly, kissed her on the eyes. She stood motionless, her eyes closed. Then with his lips close to her ear he spoke a little in the Old Speech, once more kissed her, and let her go.

She opened clear eyes and looked at him awhile with a
brooding, wondering gaze. So a newborn child looks at its mother; so a mother looks at her child. She turned slowly and went to her door, entered it, and closed it behind her: all in silence, with the still look of wonder on her face.