The Farthest Shore (27 page)

The dragon said no word, but it seemed to smile. Then, lowering its huge
head and sticking out its neck, it looked down at Ged, and spoke his name.

Its voice was huge, and soft, and smelt like a blacksmith’s
forge.

Again it spoke, and once more; and at the third time, Ged opened his eyes.
After a while he tried to sit up, but could not. Arren knelt by him and supported him.
Then Ged spoke. “Kalessin,” he said,
“senvanissai’n ar Roke!”
He had no more strength after
speaking; he leaned his head on Arren’s shoulder and shut his eyes.

The dragon made no reply. It crouched as before, not moving. The fog was
coming in again, dimming the sun as it went down to the sea.

Arren dressed and wrapped Ged in his cloak. The tide which had drawn far
out was coming in again, and he thought to carry his companion up to dryer ground on the
dunes, for he felt his strength coming back.

But as he bent to lift Ged up, the dragon put out a great, mailed foot,
almost touching him. The talons of that foot were four, with a spur behind such as a
cock’s foot has, but these were spurs of steel, and as long as scythe-blades.

“Sobriost,”
said the dragon, like a
January wind through frozen reeds.

“Let my lord be. He has saved us all, and doing
so has spent his strength and maybe his life with it. Let him be!”

So Arren spoke, fiercely and with command. He had been overawed and
frightened too much, he had been filled up with fear, and had got sick of it and would
not have it anymore. He was angry with the dragon for its brute strength and size, its
unjust advantage. He had seen death, he had tasted death, and no threat had power over
him.

The old dragon Kalessin looked at him from one long, awful, golden eye.
There were ages beyond ages in the depths of that eye; the morning of the world was deep
in it. Though Arren did not look into it, he knew that it looked upon him with profound
and mild hilarity.

“Arw sobriost,”
said the dragon, and
its rusty nostrils widened so that the banked and stifled fire deep within them
glittered.

Arren had his arm under Ged’s shoulders, having been in the act of
lifting him when Kalessin’s movement stopped him, and now he felt Ged’s head
turn a little and heard his voice: “It means, mount here.”

For a while Arren did not move. This was all folly. But there was the
great, taloned foot, set like a step in front of him; and above it, the crook of the
elbow joint; and above that, the jutting shoulder and the musculature of the wing where
it sprang from the shoulder blade: four steps, a stairway. And there in front of the
wings and the first great iron thorn of the
spine-armor, in the
hollow of the neck there was place for a man to sit astride, or two men. If they were
mad and past hope and given up to folly.

“Mount!” said Kalessin in the speech of the Making.

So Arren stood up and helped his companion to stand. Ged held his head
erect, and with Arren’s arms to guide him, climbed up those strange steps. Both
sat down astride in the rough-mailed hollow of the dragon’s neck, Arren behind,
ready to support Ged if he needed it. Both felt a warmth come into them, a welcome heat
like the sun’s heat, where they touched the dragon’s hide: life burnt in
fire beneath that iron armor.

Arren saw that they had left the mage’s staff of yew lying
half-buried in the sand; the sea was creeping in to take it. He made to get down for it,
but Ged stopped him. “Leave it. I spent all wizardry at that dry spring, Lebannen.
I am no mage now.”

Kalessin turned and looked at them sidelong; the ancient laughter was in
its eye. Whether Kalessin was male or female, there was no telling; what Kalessin
thought, there was no knowing. Slowly the wings lifted and unfurled. They were not gold
like Orm Embar’s wings but red, dark red, dark as rust or blood or the crimson
silk of Lorbanery. The dragon raised its wings carefully, lest it unseat its puny
riders. Carefully it gathered in the spring of its great haunches, and leapt like a cat
up into the air, and the wings beat down and bore them above the fog that drifted over
Selidor.

Rowing with those crimson wings in the evening air,
Kalessin wheeled out over the open sea, turned to the east, and flew.

I
N THE DAYS OF HIGH
summer on the island
of Ully a great dragon was seen flying low, and later in Usidero and in the north of
Ontuego. Though dragons are dreaded in the West Reach, where people know them all too
well, yet after this one had passed over and the villagers had come out of their hiding
places, those who had seen it said, “The dragons are not all dead, as we thought.
Maybe the wizards are not all dead, either. Surely there was a great splendor in that
flight; maybe it was the Eldest.”

Where Kalessin touched to land none saw. In those far islands there are
forests and wild hills to which few men ever come, and where even the descent of a
dragon may go unseen.

But in the Ninety Isles there was screaming and disarray. Men rowed
westward among the little islands crying, “Hide! Hide! The Dragon of Pendor has
broken his word! The Archmage has perished, and the Dragon is come devouring!”

Without landing, without looking down, the great iron-colored worm flew
over the little islands and the little towns and farms, and deigned not even a belch of
fire for such small fry. So it passed over Geath and over Serd, and crossed the straits
of the Inmost Sea, and came within sight of Roke.

Never in the memory of man, scarcely in the memory of legend, had any
dragon braved the walls visible and invisible of the
well-defended
isle. Yet this one did not hesitate, but flew on ponderous wings and heavily over the
western shore of Roke, above the villages and fields, to the green hill that rises over
Thwil Town. There at last it stooped softly to the earth, raised its red wings and
folded them, and crouched on the summit of Roke Knoll.

The boys came running out of the Great House. Nothing could have stopped
them. But for all their youth they were slower than their Masters and came second to the
Knoll. When they came, the Patterner was there, come from his Grove, his fair hair
bright in the sun. With him was the Changer, who had returned two nights before in the
shape of a great sea-osprey, lame-winged and weary; long he had been caught by his own
spells in that form and could not come into his own shape again until he came into the
Grove, on that night when the Balance was restored and the broken was made whole. The
Summoner, gaunt and frail, only one day risen from his bed, had come; and beside him
stood the Doorkeeper. And the other Masters of the Isle of the Wise were there.

They saw the riders dismount, one aiding the other. They saw them look
about with a look of strange contentment, grimness, and wonder. The dragon crouched like
stone while they clambered down from its back and stood beside it. It turned its head a
little while the Archmage spoke to it, and briefly answered him. Those who watched saw
the sidelong look of the yellow eye, cold and full of laughter. Those who understood
heard the dragon say, “I have brought the young king to his kingdom, and the old
man to his home.”

“A little farther yet, Kalessin,” Ged
replied. “I have not gone where I must go.” He looked down at the roofs and
towers of the Great House in the sunlight, and he seemed to smile a little. Then he
turned to Arren, who stood tall and slight, in worn clothes, and not wholly steady on
his legs from the weariness of the long ride and the bewilderment of all that had
passed. In the sight of them all, Ged knelt to him, down on both knees, and bowed his
grey head.

Then he stood up and kissed the young man on the cheek, saying,
“When you come to your throne in Havnor, my lord and dear companion, rule long and
well.”

He looked again at the Masters and the young wizards and the boys and the
townsfolk gathered on the slopes and at the foot of the Knoll. His face was quiet, and
in his eyes there was something like that laughter in the eyes of Kalessin. Turning from
them all, he mounted up again by the dragon’s foot and shoulder, and took his seat
reinless between the great peaks of the wings, on the neck of the dragon. The red wings
lifted with a drumming rattle, and Kalessin the Eldest sprang into the air. Fire came
from the dragon’s jaws, and smoke, and the sound of thunder and the stormwind was
in the beating of its wings. It circled the hill once and flew off, north and eastward,
toward that quarter of Earthsea where stands the mountain isle of Gont.

The Doorkeeper, smiling, said, “He has done with doing. He goes
home.”

And they watched the dragon fly between the sunlight
and the sea till it was out of sight.

T
HE
D
EED OF
G
ED
TELLS
that he who had been archmage came to the crowning
of the King of All the Isles in the Tower of the Sword in Havnor at the world’s
heart. The song tells that when the ceremony of the crowning was over and the festival
began, he left the company and went down alone to the port of Havnor. There lay out on
the water a boat, worn and beaten by storm and the weather of years; she had no sail up,
and was empty. Ged called the boat by name,
Lookfar
, and she
came to him. Entering the boat from the pier Ged turned his back on land, and without
wind or sail or oar the boat moved; it took him from harbor and from haven, westward
among the isles, westward over sea; and no more is known of him.

But in the island of Gont they tell the story otherwise, saying that it
was the young king, Lebannen, who came seeking Ged to bring him to the coronation. But
he did not find him at Gont Port or at Re Albi. No one could say where he was, only that
he had gone afoot up into the forests of the mountain. Often he went so, they said, and
did not return for many months, and no man knew the roads of his solitude. Some offered
to seek for him, but the King forbade them, saying, “He rules a greater kingdom
than I do.” And so he left the mountain, and took ship, and returned to Havnor to
be crowned.

AFTERWORD

B
EFORE
I
WROTE THE FIRST
of these books, I’d written a couple of short stories set on islands where wizardry was practiced and dragons were feared. As I’ve said, when I began to conceive that first book of Earthsea, I realized those islands belonged to a great archipelago, a world of islands, and I drew the map.

All the islands were on it, but I knew nothing of them except their names, their shapes, the bays and mountains and rivers I had marked, the names of cities on some of them. They all remained to be discovered, one by one.

There are still many islands that I’ve never been to. I can look at the map and wonder about them, just as I wonder about Tenerife or Zanzibar. And even though I’ve been to the Outer Hebrides or the Windward Isles, to Roke or Havnor, I can still wonder about them; there’s always more to learn.

The poet Roethke said, “I learn by going where I have to go.” It is a sentence that has meant a great deal to me. Sometimes it tells me that by going where it is necessary for us to go, by following
our own path, we learn our way through the world. Sometimes it tells me that we can only learn our way through the world by just starting out and going.

Understood either way, it describes how I learned Earthsea.

When I first arrived, I knew very little about wizardry and even less about dragons. Ogion and the Masters of Roke educated me about what wizards did. But I had a lot of pictures and notions about dragons in my head that I had to work through, get rid of, or borrow from, before I could see my own dragons clearly.

There are many kinds of dragon in the world, and growing up I’d learned something about a good many of them. There was the kind of dragon, in fairy tales and the Norse lore, who eats maidens and hoards jewelry. A close relative was St. George’s dragon, often a rather pathetic specimen, which I knew mostly from paintings where the saint is about to slay it, or has already slain it and is standing with one armored foot planted smugly on it. Then there were the far more impressive Chinese dragons, coiling imperially through the clouds with a fiery jewel in their claws. There were the lovable dragons of Pern. There was, barely hinted but unforgettable, the dragon whose tooth forms a great gateway in one of Lord Dunsany’s tales. There was, magnificently, Smaug.