The Farthest Shore (19 page)

He stood a long time by the mast, with watchful eyes. At last he sat down in his old place by the tiller, laying one hand upon it, and looked at Arren.

“That was Orm Embar,” he said, “the Dragon of Selidor, kin to that great Orm who slew Erreth-Akbe and was slain by him.”

“Was he hunting, lord?” said Arren; for he was not certain whether the mage had spoken to the dragon in welcome or in threat.

“Hunting me. What dragons hunt, they find. He came to ask my help.” He laughed shortly. “And that’s a thing I would not believe if any told me: that a dragon turned to a man for help. And of them all, that one! He is not the oldest, though he is very old, but he is the mightiest of his kind. He does not hide his name, as dragons and men must do. He has no fear that any can gain power over him. Nor does he deceive, in the way of his kind. Long ago, on Selidor, he let me live, and he told me a great truth: he told me how the Rune of the Kings might be refound. To him I owe the Ring of Erreth-Akbe. But never did I think to repay such a debt, to such a creditor!”

“What does he ask?”

“To show me the way I seek,” said the mage, more grimly. And after a pause, “He said, ‘In the west there is another Dragonlord; he works destruction on us, and his power is greater than ours.’
I said, ‘Even than thine, Orm Embar?’ and he said, ‘Even than mine. I need thee: follow in haste.’ And so bid, I obeyed.”

“You know no more than that?”

“I will know more.”

Arren coiled up the mooring line, stowed it, and saw to other small matters about the boat, but all the while the tension of excitement sang in him like a tightened bowstring, and it sang in his voice when he spoke at last. “This is a better guide,” he said, “than the others!”

Sparrowhawk looked at him and laughed. “Aye,” he said. “This time we will not go astray, I think.”

So those two began their great race across the ocean. A thousand miles and more it was from the uncharted seas of the raft-folk to the island Selidor, which lies of all the lands of Earthsea the farthest west. Day after day rose shining from the clear horizon and sank into the red west, and under the gold arch of the sun and the silver wheeling of the stars the boat ran northward, all alone on the sea.

Sometimes the thunderclouds of high summer massed far off, casting purple shadows down on the horizon; then Arren would watch the mage as he stood up and with voice and hand called those clouds to drift toward them and to loosen their rain down on the boat. The lightning would leap among the clouds, and the thunder would bellow. Still the mage stood with upraised hand, until the rain came pouring down on him and on Arren and into
the vessels they had set out and into the boat and onto the sea, flattening the waves with its violence. He and Arren would grin with pleasure, for of food they had enough, if none to spare, but water they needed. And the furious splendor of the storm that obeyed the mage’s word delighted them.

Arren wondered at this power which his companion now used so lightly, and once he said, “When we began our voyage, you used to work no charms.”

“The first lesson on Roke, and the last, is
Do what is needful.
And no more!”

“The lessons in between, then, must consist in learning what is needful.”

“They do. One must consider the Balance. But when the Balance itself is broken—then one considers other things. Above all, haste.”

“But how is it that all the wizards of the South—and elsewhere by now, even the chanters of the rafts—all have lost their art, but you keep yours?”

“Because I desire nothing beyond my art,” Sparrowhawk said.

And after some time he added, more cheerfully, “And if I am soon to lose it, I shall make the best of it while it lasts.”

There was indeed a kind of lightheartedness in him now, a pure pleasure in his skill, which Arren, seeing him always so careful, had not guessed. The mind of the magician takes delight in tricks; a mage is a trickster. Sparrowhawk’s disguise in Hort Town,
which had so troubled Arren, had been a game to him; a very slight game, too, for one who could transform not just his face and voice at will, but his body and very being, becoming as he chose a fish, a dolphin, a hawk. And once he said, “Look, Arren: I’ll show you Gont,” and had him look at the surface of their water-cask, which he had opened, and which was full to the brim. Many simple sorcerers can cause an image to appear on the water-mirror, and so he had done: a great peak, cloud-wreathed, rising from a grey sea. Then the image changed, and Arren saw plainly a cliff on that mountain isle. It was as if he were a bird, a gull or a falcon, hanging on the wind offshore and looking across the wind at that cliff that towered from the breakers for two thousand feet. On the high shelf of it was a little house. “That is Re Albi,” said Sparrowhawk, “and there lives my master Ogion, he who stilled the earthquake long ago. He tends his goats, and gathers herbs, and keeps his silence. I wonder if he still walks on the mountain; he is very old now. But I would know, surely I would know, even now, if Ogion died. . . .” There was no certainty in his voice; for a moment the image wavered, as if the cliff itself were falling. It cleared, and his voice cleared: “He used to go up into the forests alone in late summer and in autumn. So he came first to me, when I was a brat in a mountain village, and gave me my name. And my life with it.” The image of the water-mirror now showed as if the watcher were a bird among the forest branches, looking out to steep, sunlit meadows beneath the rock and snow of the peak,
looking inward along a steep road going down in a green, gold-shot darkness. “There is no silence like the silence of those forests,” Sparrowhawk said, yearning.

The image faded, and there was nothing but the blinding disk of the noon sun reflected in the water in the cask.

“There,” Sparrowhawk said, looking at Arren with a strange, mocking look, “there, if I could ever go back there, not even you could follow me.”

L
AND LAY AHEAD, LOW AND
blue in the afternoon like a bank of mist. “Is it Selidor?” Arren asked, and his heart beat fast, but the mage answered, “Obb, I think, or Jessage. We’re not halfway yet, lad.”

That night they sailed the straits between those two islands. They saw no lights, but there was a reek of smoke in the air, so heavy that their lungs grew raw with breathing it. When day came and they looked back, the eastern isle, Jessage, looked burnt and black as far as they could see inland from the shore, and a haze hung blue and dull above it.

“They have burnt the fields,” Arren said.

“Aye. And the villages. I have smelled that smoke before.”

“Are they savages, here in the West?”

Sparrowhawk shook his head. “Farmers; townsmen.”

Arren stared at the black ruin of the land, the withered trees of orchards against the sky; and his face was hard. “What harm
have the trees done them?” he said. “Must they punish the grass for their own faults? Men are savages, who would set a land afire because they have a quarrel with other men.”

“They have no guidance,” Sparrowhawk said. “No king; and the kingly men and the wizardly men, all turned aside and drawn into their minds, are hunting the door through death. So it was in the South, and so I guess it to be here.”

“And this is one man’s doing—the one the dragon spoke of? It seems not possible.”

“Why not? If there were a King of the Isles, he would be one man. And he would rule. One man may as easily destroy as govern: be King or Anti-King.”

There was again that note in his voice of mockery or challenge which roused Arren’s temper.

“A king has servants, soldiers, messengers, lieutenants. He governs through his servants. Where are the servants of this—Anti-King?”

“In our minds, lad. In our minds. The traitor, the self; the self that cries
I want to live; let the world burn so long as I can live!
The little traitor soul in us, in the dark, like the worm in the apple. He talks to all of us. But only some understand him. The wizards and the sorcerers. The singers; the makers. And the heroes, the ones who seek to be themselves. To be one’s self is a rare thing and a great one. To be one’s self
forever
: is that not better still?”

Arren looked straight at Sparrowhawk. “You would say to me
that it is not better. But tell me why. I was a child when I began this voyage, a child who did not believe in death. You think me a child still, but I have learnt something, not much, maybe, but something: I have learnt that death exists and that I am to die. But I have not learnt to rejoice in the knowledge, to welcome my death or yours. If I love life, shall I not hate the end of it? Why should I not desire immortality?”

Arren’s fencing-master in Berila had been a man of about sixty, short and bald and cold. Arren had disliked him for years, though he knew him to be an extraordinary swordsman. But one day in practice he had caught his master off guard and nearly disarmed him, and he had never forgotten the incredulous, incongruous happiness that had suddenly gleamed in the master’s cold face, the hope, the joy—an equal, at last an equal! From that moment on, the fencing-master had trained him mercilessly, and whenever they fenced, that same relentless smile would be on the old man’s face, brightening as Arren pressed him harder. And it was on Sparrowhawk’s face now, the flash of steel in sunlight.

“Why should you not desire immortality? How should you not? Every soul desires it, and its health is in the strength of its desire. But be careful; you are one who might achieve your desire.”

“And then?”

“And then this: a false king ruling, the arts of man forgotten, the singer tongueless, the eye blind. This! This blight and plague on the lands, this sore we seek to heal. There are two, Arren, two
that make one: the world and the shadow, the light and the dark. The two poles of the Balance. Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars. In life is death. In death is rebirth. What then is life without death? Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal? What is it but death—death without rebirth?”

“If so much hinges on it, then, my lord, if one man’s life might wreck the Balance of the Whole, surely it is not possible—it would not be allowed—” He halted, confused.

“Who allows? Who forbids?”

“I do not know.”

“Nor I. But I know how much evil one man, one life, can do. I know it all too well. I know it because I have done it. I have done the same evil, in the same folly of pride. I opened the door between the worlds just a crack, just a little crack, just to show that I was stronger than death itself. . . . I was young and had not met death—like you. . . . It took the strength of the Archmage Nemmerle, it took his mastery and his life, to shut that door. You can see the mark that night left on me, on my face; but him it killed. Oh, the door between the light and the darkness can be opened, Arren; it takes strength, but it can be done. But to shut it again, there’s a different story.”

“But, my lord, what you speak of surely is different from this—”

“Why? Because I am a good man?” That coldness of steel, of the falcon’s eye, was in Sparrowhawk’s look again. “What is a good man, Arren? Is a good man one who would not do evil, who would not open a door to the darkness, who has no darkness in him? Look again, lad. Look a little farther; you will need what you learn, to go where you must go. Look into yourself! Did you not hear a voice say
Come
? Did you not follow?”

“I did. I—I have not forgotten. But I thought . . . I thought that voice was . . . his.”

“Aye, it was his. And it was yours. How could he speak to you, across the seas, but in your own voice? How is it that he calls to those who know how to listen, the mages and the makers and the seekers, who heed the voice within them? How is it that he does not call to me? It is because I will not listen; I will not hear that voice again. You were born to power, Arren, as I was; power over men, over men’s souls; and what is that but power over life and death? You are young, you stand on the borders of possibility, on the shadowland, in the realm of dream, and you hear the voice saying
Come.
But I, who am old, who have done what I must do, who stand in the daylight facing my own death, the end of all possibility, I know that there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept.”

Jessage was far behind them now, a blue smudge on the sea, a stain.

“Then I am his servant,” Arren said.

“You are. And I am yours.”

“But who is he, then? What is he?”

“A man, I think—even as you and I.”

“That man you spoke of once—the wizard of Havnor, who summoned up the dead? Is it he?”

“It may well be. He had great power, and it was all bent on denying death. And he knew the Great Spells of the Lore of Paln. I was young and a fool when I used that lore, and I brought ruin on myself. But if an old man and a strong one used it, careless of all consequence, he might bring ruin on us all.”

“Were you not told that that man was dead?”

“Aye,” said Sparrowhawk, “I was.”

And they said no more.

That night the sea was full of fire. The sharp waves thrown back by
Lookfar
’s prow and the movement of every fish through the surface water were all outlined and alive with light. Arren sat with his arm on the gunwale and his head on his arm, watching those curves and whorls of silver radiance. He put his hand in the water and raised it again, and light ran softly from his fingers. “Look,” he said, “I too am a wizard.”

“That gift you have not,” said his companion.

“Much good I shall be to you without it,” said Arren, gazing at the restless shimmer of the waves, “when we meet our enemy.”

For he had hoped—from the very beginning he had hoped—that the reason the Archmage had chosen him and him alone for
this voyage was that he had some inborn power, descended from his ancestor Morred, which would in the ultimate need and the blackest hour be revealed: and so he would save himself and his lord and all the world from the enemy. But lately he had looked once more at that hope, and it was as if he saw it from a great distance; it was like remembering that, when he was a very little boy, he had had a burning desire to try on his father’s crown, and had wept when he was forbidden to. This hope was as ill-timed, as childish. There was no magery in him. There never would be.