The Farthest Shore (14 page)

His voice had not softened. Arren answered him as grimly, “How should I turn back, with no boat, here on the edge of the world?”

“This the edge of the world? No, that is farther on. We may yet come to it.”

Arren nodded once and swung down into the boat. Sparrowhawk loosed the line and spoke a light wind into the sail. Once away from the looming, empty docks of Lorbanery the air blew cool and clean out of the dark north, and the moon broke silver from the sleek sea before them and rode upon their left as they turned southward to coast the isle.

CHAPTER 7

T
HE MADMAN, THE
D
YER OF
Lorbanery, sat huddled up against the mast, his arms wrapped around his knees and his head hunched down. His mass of wiry hair looked black in the moonlight. Sparrowhawk had rolled himself up in a blanket and gone to sleep in the stern of the boat. Neither of them stirred. Arren sat up in the prow; he had sworn to himself to watch all night. If the mage chose to assume that their lunatic passenger would not assault him or Arren in the night, that was all very well for him; Arren, however, would make his own assumptions and undertake his own responsibilities.

But the night was very long and very calm. The moonlight poured down, changeless. Huddled by the mast, Sopli snored, long, soft snores. Softly the boat moved onward; softly Arren slid into sleep. He started awake once and saw the moon scarcely higher; he abandoned his self-righteous guardianship, made himself comfortable, and went to sleep.

He dreamt again, as he seemed always to do on this voyage, and
at first the dreams were fragmentary but strangely sweet and reassuring. In place of
Lookfar’
s mast a tree grew, with great, arching arms of foliage; swans guided the boat, swooping on strong wings before it; far ahead, over the beryl-green sea, shone a city of white towers. Then he was in one of those towers, climbing the steps which spiralled upward, running up them lightly and eagerly. These scenes changed and recurred and led into others, which passed without trace; but suddenly he was in the dreaded, dull twilight on the moors, and the horror grew in him until he could not breathe. But he went forward, because he must go forward. After a long time he realized that to go forward here was to go in a circle and come round on one’s own tracks again. Yet he must get out, get away. It grew more and more urgent. He began to run. As he ran, the circles narrowed in and the ground began to slant. He was running in the darkening gloom, faster and faster, around the sinking inner lip of a pit, an enormous whirlpool sucking down to darkness: and as he knew this, his foot slipped and he fell.

“What’s the matter, Arren?”

Sparrowhawk spoke to him from the stern. Grey dawn held the sky and sea still.

“Nothing.”

“The nightmare?”

“Nothing.”

Arren was cold, and his right arm ached from having been cramped under him. He shut his eyes against the growing light
and thought, He hints of this and hints of that, but he will never tell me clearly where we’re going, or why, or why I should go there. And now he drags this madman with us. Which is maddest, the lunatic or I, for coming with him? The two of them may understand each other; it’s the wizards who are mad now, Sopli said. I could have been at home by now, at home in the Hall in Berila, in my room with the carven walls and the red rugs on the floor and a fire in the hearth, waking up to go out a-hawking with my father. Why did I come with him? Why did he bring me? Because it’s my way to go, he says, but that’s wizard’s talk, making things seem great by great words. But the meaning of the words is always somewhere else. If I have any way to go, it’s to my home, not wandering senselessly across the Reaches. I have duties at home and am shirking them. If he really thinks there is some enemy of wizardry at work, why did he come alone, with me? He might have brought another mage to help him—a hundred of them. He could have brought an army of warriors, a fleet of ships. Is this how a great peril is met, by sending out an old man and a boy in a boat? This is mere folly. He is mad himself; it is as he said, he seeks death. He seeks death, and wants to take me with him. But I am not mad and not old; I will not die; I will not go with him.

He sat up on his elbow, looking forward. The moon that had risen before them as they left Sosara Bay was again before them, sinking. Behind, in the east, day came wan and dull. There were
no clouds, but a faint, sickly overcast. Later in the day the sun grew hot, but it shone veiled, without splendor.

All day long they coasted Lorbanery, low and green to their right hand. A light wind blew off the land and filled their sail. Toward evening they passed a long last cape; the breeze died down. Sparrowhawk spoke the magewind into the sail, and like a falcon loosed from the wrist,
Lookfar
started and fled forward eagerly, putting the Isle of Silk behind.

Sopli the Dyer had cowered in the same place all day, evidently afraid of the boat and afraid of the sea, seasick and wretched. He spoke now, hoarsely. “Are we going west?”

The sunset was right in his face; but Sparrowhawk, patient with his stupidest questions, nodded.

“To Obehol?”

“Obehol lies west of Lorbanery.”

“A long way west. Maybe the place is there.”

“What is it like, the place?”

“How do I know? How could I see it? It’s not on Lorbanery! I hunted for it for years, four years, five years, in the dark, at night, shutting my eyes, always with him calling
Come, come,
but I couldn’t come. I’m no lord of wizards who can tell the ways in the dark. But there’s a place to come to in the light, under the sun too. That’s what Mildi and my mother wouldn’t understand. They kept looking in the dark. Then old Mildi died, and my mother lost her mind. She forgot the spells we use in the dyeing, and it affected her mind. She
wanted to die, but I told her to wait. Wait till I find the place. There must be a place. If the dead can come back to life in the world, there must be a place in the world where it happens.”

“Are the dead coming back to life?”

“I thought you knew such things,” Sopli said after a pause, looking askance at Sparrowhawk.

“I seek to know them.”

Sopli said nothing. The mage suddenly looked at him, a direct, compelling gaze, though his tone was gentle: “Are you looking for a way to live forever, Sopli?”

Sopli returned his gaze for a moment; then he hid his shaggy, brownish-red head in his arms, locking his hands across his ankles, and rocked himself a little back and forth. It seemed that when he was frightened he took this position; and when he was in it, he would not speak or take any notice of what was said. Arren turned away from him in despair and disgust. How could they go on, with Sopli, for days or weeks, in an eighteen-foot boat? It was like sharing a body with a diseased soul. . . .

Sparrowhawk came up beside Arren in the prow and knelt with one knee on the thwart, looking into the sallow evening. He said, “The man has a gentle spirit.”

Arren did not answer this. He asked coldly, “What is Obehol? I never heard the name.”

“I know its name and place on the charts; no more. . . . Look there: the companions of Gobardon!”

The great topaz-colored star was higher in the south now, and beneath it, just clearing the dim sea, shone a white star to the left and a bluish-white one to the right, forming a triangle.

“Have they names?”

“The Master Namer did not know. Maybe the men of Obehol and Wellogy have names for them. I do not know. We go now into strange seas, Arren, under the Sign of Ending.”

The boy did not answer, looking with a kind of loathing at the bright, nameless stars above the endless water.

A
S THEY SAILED WESTWARD DAY
after day, the warmth of the southern spring lay on the waters, and the sky was clear. Yet it seemed to Arren that there was a dullness in the light, as if it fell aslant through glass. The sea was lukewarm when he swam, bringing little refreshment. Their salt food had no savor. There was no freshness or brightness in anything, unless it was at night, when the stars burned with a greater radiance than he had ever seen in them. He would lie and watch them till he slept. Sleeping, he would dream: always the dream of the moors or the pit or a valley hemmed round by cliffs or a long road going downward under a low sky; always the dim light, and the horror in him, and the hopeless effort to escape.

He never spoke of this to Sparrowhawk. He did not speak of anything important to him, nothing but the small daily incidents of their sailing; and Sparrowhawk, who had always had to be drawn out, was now habitually silent.

Arren saw now what a fool he had been to entrust himself body and soul to this restless and secretive man, who let impulse move him and made no effort to control his life, nor even to save it. For now the fey mood was on him; and that, Arren thought, was because he dared not face his own failure—the failure of wizardry as a great power among men.

It was clear now that to those who knew the secrets, there were not many secrets to that Art Magic from which Sparrowhawk, and all the generations of sorcerers and wizards, had made much fame and power. There was not much more to it than the use of wind and weather, the knowledge of healing herbs, and a skillful show of such illusions as mists and lights and shape-changes, which could awe the ignorant, but which were mere tricks. Reality was not changed. There was nothing in magery that gave a man true power over men; nor was it any use against death. The mages lived no longer than ordinary men. All their secret words could not put off for one hour the coming of their deaths.

Even in small matters magery was not worth counting on. Sparrowhawk was always miserly about employing his arts; they went by the world’s wind whenever they might, they fished for food, and they spared their water, like any sailors. After four days of interminable tacking into a fitful headwind, Arren asked him if he would not speak a little following wind into the sail, and when he shook his head, said, “Why not?”

“I would not ask a sick man to run a race,” said Sparrowhawk,
“nor lay a stone on an overburdened back.” It was not clear whether he spoke of himself or of the world at large. Always his answers were grudging, hard to understand. There, thought Arren, lay the very heart of wizardry: to hint at mighty meanings while saying nothing at all, and to make doing nothing at all seem the very crown of wisdom.

Arren had tried to ignore Sopli, but it was impossible; and in any case he soon found himself in a kind of alliance with the madman. Sopli was not so mad, or not so simply mad, as his wild hair and fragmented talk made him appear. Indeed the maddest thing about him was perhaps his terror of the water. To come into a boat had taken desperate courage, and he never really got the edge worn off his fear; he kept his head down so much so that he would not have to see the water heaving and lapping about him. To stand up in the boat made him giddy; he clung to the mast. The first time Arren decided on a swim and dived off the prow, Sopli shouted out in horror; when Arren came climbing back into the boat, the poor man was green with shock. “I thought you were drowning yourself,” he said, and Arren had to laugh.

That afternoon, when Sparrowhawk sat meditating, unheeding and unhearing, Sopli came hitching cautiously over the thwarts to Arren. He said in a low voice, “You don’t want to die, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“He does,” Sopli said, with a little shift of his lower jaw toward Sparrowhawk.

“Why do you say that?”

Arren took a lordly tone, which indeed came naturally to him, and Sopli accepted it as natural, though he was ten or fifteen years older than Arren. He replied with ready civility, though in his usual fragmentary way, “He wants to get to the secret place. But I don’t know why. He doesn’t want. . . . He doesn’t believe in . . . the promise.”

“What promise?”

Sopli glanced up at him sharply, something of his ruined manhood in his eyes; but Arren’s will was stronger. He answered very low, “You know. Life. Eternal life.”

A great chill went through Arren’s body. He remembered his dreams: the moor, the pit, the cliffs, the dim light. That was death; that was the horror of death. It was from death he must escape, must find the way. And on the doorsill stood the figure crowned with shadow, holding out a little light no larger than a pearl, the glimmer of immortal life.