The Farthest Shore (21 page)

O
N THE SEAS OF THE
outermost West Reach, that Lord of the Island of the Wise, waking cramped and stiff in a small boat on a cold, bright morning, sat up and yawned. And after a moment, pointing north, he said to his yawning companion, “There! Two islands, do you see them? The southmost of the isles of the Dragons’ Run.”

“You have a hawk’s eyes, lord,” said Arren, peering through sleep over the sea and seeing nothing.

“Therefore I am the Sparrowhawk,” the mage said; he was still cheerful, seeming to shrug off forethought and foreboding. “Can’t you see them?”

“I see gulls,” said Arren, after rubbing his eyes and searching all the blue-grey horizon before the boat.

The mage laughed. “Could even a hawk see gulls at twenty miles’ distance?”

As the sun brightened above the eastern mists, the tiny wheeling flecks in the air that Arren watched seemed to sparkle, like
gold-dust shaken in water, or dust-motes in a sunbeam. And then Arren realized that they were dragons.

As
Lookfar
approached the islands, Arren saw the dragons soaring and circling on the morning wind, and his heart leapt up with them with a joy, a joy of fulfillment, that was like pain. All the glory of mortality was in that flight. Their beauty was made up of terrible strength, utter wildness, and the grace of reason. For these were thinking creatures, with speech and ancient wisdom: in the patterns of their flight there was a fierce, willed concord.

Arren did not speak, but he thought: I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.

At times the patterns jarred, and the circles broke, and often in flight one dragon or another would jet from its nostrils a long streak of fire that curved and hung on the air a moment, repeating the curve and brightness of the dragon’s long, arching body. Seeing that, the mage said, “They are angry. They dance their anger on the wind.”

And presently he said, “Now we’re in the hornet’s nest.” For the dragons had seen the little sail on the waves, and first one, then another, broke from the whirlwind of their dancing and came stretched long and level on the air, rowing with great wings, straight toward the boat.

The mage looked at Arren, who sat at the tiller, since the waves ran rough and counter. The boy held it steady with a steady hand, though his eyes were on the beating of those wings.
As if satisfied, Sparrowhawk turned again, and standing by the mast, let the magewind drop from the sail. He lifted up his staff and spoke aloud.

At the sound of his voice and the words of the Old Speech, some of the dragons wheeled in midflight, scattering, and returned to the isles. Others halted and hovered, the swordlike claws of their forearms outstretched but checked. One, dropping low over the water, flew slowly on toward them: in two wing-strokes it was over the boat. The mailed belly scarcely cleared the mast. Arren saw the wrinkled, unarmored flesh between the inner shoulder-joint and breast, which, with the eye, is the dragon’s only vulnerable part, unless the spear that strikes is mightily enchanted. The smoke that roiled from the long, toothed mouth choked him, and with it came a carrion stench that made him wince and retch.

The shadow passed. It returned, as low as before, and this time Arren felt the furnace-blast of breath before the smoke. He heard Sparrowhawk’s voice, clear and fierce. The dragon passed over. Then all were gone, streaming back to the isles like fiery cinders on a gust of wind.

Arren caught his breath and wiped his forehead, which was covered with cold sweat. Looking at his companion, he saw his hair gone white: the dragon’s breath had burnt and crisped the ends of the hairs. And the heavy cloth of the sail was scorched brown along one side.

“Your head is somewhat singed, lad.”

“So is yours, lord.”

Sparrowhawk passed his hand over his hair, surprised. “So it is!—That was an insolence; but I seek no quarrel with these creatures. They seem mad or bewildered. They did not speak. Never have I met a dragon who did not speak before it struck, if only to torment its prey. . . . Now we must go forward. Do not look them in the eye, Arren. Turn aside your face if you must. We’ll go with the world’s wind; it blows fair from the south, and I may need my art for other things. Hold her as she goes.”

Lookfar
moved forward and soon had on her left a distant island and on her right the twin isles they had seen first. These rose up into low cliffs, and all the stark rock was whitened with the droppings of the dragons and of the little, blackheaded terns that nested fearlessly among them.

The dragons had flown up high, and circled in the upper air as vultures circle. Not one stooped down again to the boat. Sometimes they cried out to one another, high and harsh across the gulfs of air, but if there were words in their crying, Arren could not make them out.

The boat rounded a short promontory, and he saw on the shore what he took for a moment to be a ruined fortress. It was a dragon. One black wing was bent under it and the other stretched out vast across the sand and into the water, so that the come and go of waves moved it a little to and fro in a mockery of flight. The long snake-body lay full length on the rock and sand. One foreleg was missing,
the armor and flesh were torn from the great arch of the ribs, and the belly was torn open, so that the sand for yards about was blackened with the poisoned dragon-blood. Yet the creature still lived. So great a life is in dragons that only an equal power of wizardry can kill them swiftly. The green-gold eyes were open, and as the boat sailed by, the lean, huge head moved a little, and with a rattling hiss, steam mixed with bloody spray shot from the nostrils.

The beach between the dying dragon and the sea’s edge was tracked and scored by the feet and heavy bodies of his kind, and his entrails were trodden into the sand.

Neither Arren nor Sparrowhawk spoke until they were well clear of that island and heading across the choppy, restless channel of the Dragons’ Run, full of reefs and pinnacles and shapes of rock, toward the northern islands of the double chain. Then Sparrowhawk said, “That was an evil sight,” and his voice was bleak and cold.

“Do they . . . eat their own kind?”

“No. No more than we do. They have been driven mad. Their speech has been taken from them. They who spoke before men spoke, they who are older than any living thing, the Children of Segoy—they have been driven to the dumb terror of the beasts. Ah! Kalessin! Where have your wings borne you? Have you lived to see your race learn shame?” His voice rang like struck iron, and he looked upward, searching the sky. But the dragons were behind, circling lower now above the rocky isles
and the blood-stained beach, and overhead was nothing but the blue sky and the sun of noon.

There was then no man living who had sailed the Dragons’ Run or seen it, except the Archmage. Twenty years before and more, he had sailed the length of it from east to west and back again. It was a nightmare and a marvel, to a sailor. The water was a maze of blue channels and green shoals, and among these, by hand and word and most vigilant care, he and Arren now picked their boat’s way, between the rocks and reefs. Some of these lay low, under or half-under the wash of the waves, covered with anemone and barnacle and ribbony sea fern; like water-monsters, shelled or sinuous. Others stood up in cliff and pinnacle sheer from the sea, and these were arches and half-arches, carven towers, fantastic shapes of animals, boar’s backs and serpent’s heads, all huge, deformed, diffuse, as if life writhed half-conscious in the rock. The sea-waves beat on them with a sound like breathing, and they were wet with the bright, bitter spray. In one such rock from the south there was plainly visible the hunched shoulders and heavy, noble head of a man, stooped in pondering thought above the sea; but when the boat had passed it, looking back from the north, all man was gone from it, and the massive rocks revealed a cave in which the sea rose and fell making a hollow, clapping thunder. There seemed to be a word, a syllable, in that sound. As they sailed on, the garbling echoes lessened and this syllable came more clearly, so that Arren said, “Is there a voice in the cave?”

“The sea’s voice.”

“But it speaks a word.”

Sparrowhawk listened; he glanced at Arren and back at the cave. “How do you hear it?”

“As saying the sound
ahm.
”

“In the Old Speech that signifies the beginning, or long ago. But I hear it as
ohb
, which is a way of saying the end.—Look ahead there!” he ended abruptly, even as Arren warned him, “Shoal water!” And, though
Lookfar
picked her way like a cat among the dangers, they were busy with the steering for some while, and slowly the cave forever thundering out its enigmatic word fell behind them.

Now the water deepened, and they came out from among the phantasmagoria of the rocks. Ahead of them loomed an island like a tower. Its cliffs were black and made up of many cylinders or great pillars pressed together, with straight edges and plane surfaces, rising three hundred feet sheer from the water.

“That is the Keep of Kalessin,” said the mage. “So the dragons named it to me, when I was here long ago.”

“Who is Kalessin?

“The eldest . . .”

“Did he build this place?”

“I do not know. I don’t know if it was built. Nor how old he is. I say ‘he,’ but I do not even know that. . . . To Kalessin, Orm Embar is like a yearling kid. And you and I are like mayflies.” He
scanned the terrific palisades, and Arren looked up at them uneasily, thinking how a dragon might drop from that far, black rim and be upon them almost with its shadow. But no dragon came. They passed slowly through the still waters in the lee of the rock, hearing nothing but the whisper and clap of shadowed waves on the columns of basalt. The water here was deep, without reef or rock; Arren handled the boat, and Sparrowhawk stood up in the prow, searching the cliffs and the bright sky ahead.

The boat passed out at last from the shadow of the Keep of Kalessin into the sunlight of late afternoon. They were across the Dragons’ Run. The mage lifted his head, like one who sees what he had looked to see, and across that great space of gold before them came on golden wings the dragon Orm Embar.

Arren heard Sparrowhawk’s cry to him:
“Aro Kalessin?”
He guessed the meaning of that, but could make no sense of what the dragon answered. Yet hearing the Old Speech he felt always that he was on the point of understanding, almost understanding: as if it were a language he had forgotten, not one he had never known. In speaking it the mage’s voice was much clearer than when he spoke Hardic, and seemed to make a kind of silence about it, as does the softest touch on a great bell. But the dragon’s voice was like a gong, both deep and shrill, or the hissing thrum of cymbals. Arren watched his companion stand there in the narrow prow, speaking with the monstrous creature that hovered above him filling half the sky; and a kind of rejoicing pride came into
the boy’s heart, to see how small a thing a man is, how frail and how terrible. For the dragon could have torn the man’s head from his shoulders with one stroke of his taloned foot, he could have crushed and sunk the boat as a stone sinks a floating leaf, if it were only size that mattered. But Sparrowhawk was as dangerous as Orm Embar, and the dragon knew it.

The mage turned his head. “Lebannen,” he said, and the boy got up and came forward, though he wanted to go not one step closer to those fifteen-foot jaws and the long, slit-pupilled, yellow-green eyes that burned upon him from the air.

Sparrowhawk said nothing to him, but put a hand on his shoulder, and spoke again to the dragon, briefly.

“Lebannen,” said the vast voice with no passion in it. “
Agni
Lebannen!”

He looked up; the pressure of the mage’s hand reminded him, and he avoided the gaze of the green-gold eyes.

He could not speak the Old Speech, but he was not dumb. “I greet thee, Orm Embar, Lord Dragon,” he said clearly, as one prince greets another.

Then there was a silence, and Arren’s heart beat hard and labored. But Sparrowhawk, standing by him, smiled.

After that the dragon spoke again, and Sparrowhawk replied; and this seemed long to Arren. At last it was over, suddenly. The dragon sprang aloft with a wingbeat that all but heeled the boat over, and was off. Arren looked at the sun and found it seemed no
nearer setting than before; the time had not really been long. But the mage’s face was the color of wet ashes, and his eyes glittered as he turned to Arren. He sat down on the thwart.

“Well done, lad,” he said hoarsely. “It is not easy—talking to dragons.”

Arren got them food, for they had not eaten all day; and the mage said no more until they had eaten and drunk. By then the sun was low to the horizon, though in these northern latitudes, and not long past midsummer, night came late and slowly.

“Well,” he said at last, “Orm Embar has, after his fashion, told me much. He says that the one we seek is and is not on Selidor. . . . It is hard for a dragon to speak plainly. They do not have plain minds. And even when one of them would speak the truth to a man, which is seldom, he does not know how truth looks to a man. So I asked him, ‘Even as thy father Orm is on Selidor?’ For as you know, there Orm and Erreth-Akbe died in their battle. And he answered, ‘No and yes. You will find him on Selidor, but not on Selidor.’” Sparrowhawk paused and pondered, chewing on a crust of hard bread. “Maybe he meant that though the man is not on Selidor, yet I must go there to get to him. Maybe. . . .

“I asked him then of the other dragons. He said that this man has been among them, having no fear of them, for though killed he returns from death in his body, alive. Therefore they fear him as a creature outside nature. Their fear gives his wizardry hold
over them, and he takes the Speech of the Making from them, leaving them prey to their own wild nature. So they devour one another or take their own lives, plunging into the sea—a loathly death for the fireserpent, the beast of wind and fire. Then I said, ‘Where is thy lord Kalessin?’ and all he would answer was, ‘In the West,’ which might mean that Kalessin has flown away to the other lands, which dragons say lie farther than ever ship has sailed; or it may not mean that.