The Other Wind (20 page)

Tenar looked down the length of the ship at the king. Through her misgivings and heaviness of heart, unruly laughter welled up in her. She thought, Poor boy, what will you do now? They’ve fallen in love with her the first chance they got to see her, even though they can’t see her . . . Oh, Lebannen, we’re all in league against you!

***

D
OLPHIN
WAS A FAIR-SIZED SHIP
, fitted out to carry a king in some state and comfort; but first and foremost she was made to sail, to fly with the wind, to take him where he needed to go as quickly as could be. Accommodations were cramped enough when it was only the crew and officers, the king and a few companions aboard. On this voyage to Roke, accommodations were jammed. The crew, to be sure, were in no more than usual discomfort, sleeping down in the three-foot-high kennel of the foreward hold; but the officers had to share one wretched black closet under the forecastle. As for the passengers, all four women were in what was normally the king’s cabin, which ran the narrow width of the sterncastle of the ship, while the cabin beneath it, usually occupied by the ship’s master and one or two other officers, was shared by the king, the two wizards, the sorcerer, and Tosla. The probability of misery and bad temper was, Tenar thought, limitless. The first and most urgent probability, however, was that the High Princess was going to be sick.

They were sailing down the Great Bay with the mildest following wind, the water calm, the ship gliding along like a swan on a pond; but Seserakh cowered on her bunk, crying out in despair whenever she looked out through her veils and caught sight of the sunny, peaceful vista of unexcited water, the mild white wake of the ship, through the broad stern windows. “It will go up and down,” she moaned in Kargish.

“It is not going up and down at all,” Tenar said. “Use your head, princess!”

“It is my stomach not my head,” Seserakh whimpered.

“Nobody could possibly be seasick in this weather. You are simply afraid.”

“Mother,” Tehanu protested, understanding the tone if not the words. “Don’t scold her. It’s miserable to be sick.”

“She is not sick!” Tenar said. She was absolutely convinced of the truth of what she said. “Seserakh, you are not sick. You are afraid of being sick. Get hold of yourself. Come out on deck. Fresh air will make all the difference. Fresh air and courage.”

“Oh my friend,” Seserakh murmured in Hardic. “Make me courage!”

Tenar was a little taken aback. “You have to make it yourself, princess,” she said. Then, relenting, “Come on, just try it out on deck for a minute. Tehanu, see if you can persuade her. Think what she’ll suffer if we do meet some weather!”

Between them they got Seserakh to her feet and into her cylinder of red veiling, without which she could not of course appear before the eyes of men; they coaxed and wheedled her to creep out of the cabin, onto the bit of deck to the side of it, in the shade, where they could all sit in a row on the bone-white, impeccable decking and look out at the blue and shining sea.

Seserakh parted her veils enough that she could see straight in front of her; but she mostly looked at her lap, with an occasional, brief, terrified glance at the water, after which she shut her eyes and then looked down at her lap again.

Tenar and Tehanu talked a little, pointing out ships that passed, birds, an island. “It’s lovely. I forgot how I like to sail!” Tenar said.

“I like it if I can forget the water,” said Tehanu. “It’s like flying.”

“Ah, you dragons,” Tenar said.

It was spoken lightly, but it was not lightly said. It was the first time she had ever said anything of the kind to her adopted daughter. She was aware that Tehanu had turned her head to look at her with her seeing eye. Tenar’s heart beat heavily. “Air and fire,” she said.

Tehanu said nothing. But her hand, the brown slender hand, not the claw, reached out and took hold of Tenar’s hand and held it tightly.

“I don’t know what I am, mother,” she whispered in her voice that was seldom more than a whisper.

“I do,” Tenar said. And her heart beat heavier and harder than before.

“I’m not like Irian,” Tehanu said. She was trying to comfort her mother, to reassure her, but there was longing in her voice, yearning jealousy, profound desire.

“Wait, wait and find out,” her mother replied, finding it hard to speak. “You’ll know what to do . . . what you are . . . when the time comes.”

They were talking so softly that the princess could not hear what they said, if she could understand it. They had forgotten her. But she had caught the name Irian, and parting her veils with her long hands and turning to them, her eyes looking out bright from the warm red shadow, she asked, “Irian, she is?”

“Somewhere forward—up there—” Tenar waved at the rest of the ship.

“She makes herself courage. Ah?”

After a moment Tenar said, “She doesn’t need to make it, I think. She’s fearless.”

“Ah,” said the princess.

Her bright eyes were gazing out of shadow all the length of the ship, to the prow, where Irian stood beside Lebannen. The king was pointing ahead, gesturing, talking with animation. He laughed, and Irian, standing by him, as tall as he, laughed too.

“Barefaced,” Seserakh muttered in Kargish. And then in Hardic, thoughtfully, almost inaudibly, “Fearless.”

She closed her veils and sat featureless, unmoving.

***

T
HE LONG SHORES OF
H
AVNOR
were blue behind them. Mount Onn floated faint and high in the north. The black basalt columns of the Isle of Omer towered off the ship’s right side as she worked across the Ebavnor Straits towards the Inmost Sea. The sun was bright, the wind fresh, another fine day. All the women were sitting under the sailcloth awning the sailors had rigged for them beside the aftercabin. Women brought good luck to a ship, and the sailors couldn’t do enough for them in the way of ingenious little comforts and amenities. Because wizards could bring good luck or, equally, bad luck to a ship, the sailors also treated the wizards very well; their awning was rigged in a corner of the quarterdeck, where they had a good view forward. The women had velvet cushions to sit on (provided by the king’s forethought, or his majordomo’s); the wizards had packets of sailcloth, which did very well.

Alder found himself treated as and considered to be one of the wizards. He could do nothing about it, though it embarrassed him lest Onyx and Seppel should think he was claiming equality with them, and it also troubled him because he was now not even a sorcerer. His gift was gone. He had no power at all. He knew it as surely as he would have known the loss of his sight, the paralysis of his hand. He could not have mended a broken pitcher now, unless with glue; and he would have done it badly, because he had never had to do it.

And beyond the craft he had lost was something else, something larger than the craft, that was gone. Its loss left him, as his wife’s death had, in a blankness in which no joy, no new thing was or would ever be. Nothing could happen, nothing could change.

Not having known of this larger aspect of his gift till he lost it, he pondered on it, wondering about its nature. It was like knowing the way to go, he thought, like knowing the direction of home. Not a thing one could identify or even say much about, but a connection on which everything else depended. Without it he was desolate. He was useless.

But at least he did no harm. His dreams were fleeting, meaningless. They never took him to those dreary moorlands, the hill of dead grass, the wall. No voices called him to the dark.

He thought often of Sparrowhawk, wishing he could talk with him: the Archmage who had spent all his power, and having been great among the great, now lived his life out poor and disregarded. Yet the king longed to show him honor; so Sparrowhawk’s poverty was by choice. Perhaps, Alder thought, riches or high estate would have been only shameful to a man who had lost his true wealth, his way.

Onyx clearly regretted having led Alder to make this trade or bargain. He had always been entirely civil to Alder, but he now treated him with regard and compunction, while his manner to the wizard of Paln had become a little distant. Alder himself felt no resentment towards Seppel and no distrust of his intentions. The Old Powers were the Old Powers. You used them at your risk. Seppel had told him what he must pay, and he had paid it. He had not understood quite how much there was to pay; but that was not Seppel’s fault. It was his own, for never having valued his gift at its true worth.

So he sat with the two wizards, thinking of himself as false coin to their gold, but listening to them with all his mind; for they trusted him and spoke freely, and their talk was an education he had never dreamed of as a sorcerer.

Sitting there in the bright pale shade of the canvas awning, they talked of a bargain, a greater bargain than the one he had made to stop his dreams. Onyx said more than once the words of the Old Speech Seppel had spoken on the rooftop:
Verw nadan.
As they talked, little by little Alder gathered that the meaning of those words was something like a choice, a division, making two things of one. Far, far back in time, before the Kings of Enlad, before the writing of Hardic, maybe before there was a Hardic tongue, when there was only the Language of the Making, it seemed that people had made some kind of choice, given up one great power or possession to gain another.

The wizards’ talk of this was hard to follow, not so much because they hid anything but because they themselves were groping after things lost in the cloudy past, the time before memory. Words of the Old Speech came into their talk of necessity, and sometimes Onyx spoke entirely in that tongue. But Seppel would answer him in Hardic. Seppel was sparing with the words of the Making. Once he held up his hand to stop Onyx from going on, and at the Roke wizard’s look of surprise and question, said mildly, “Spellwords act.”

Alder’s teacher Gannet, too, had called the words of the Old Speech spellwords. “Each is a deed of power,” he had said. “True word makes truth be.” Gannet had been stingy with the spellwords he knew, speaking them only at need, and when he wrote any rune but the common ones that were used to write Hardic, he erased it almost as he finished it. Most sorcerers were similarly careful, either to guard their knowledge for themselves or because they respected the power of the Language of the Making. Even Seppel, wizard as he was, with a far wider knowledge and understanding of those words, preferred not to use them in conversation, but to keep to ordinary language which, if it allowed lies and errors, also permitted uncertainty and retraction.

Perhaps that had been part of the great choice men made in ancient times: to give up the innate knowledge of the Old Speech, which they once shared with the dragons. Had they done so, Alder wondered, in order to have a language of their own, a language suited to mankind, in which they could lie, cheat, swindle, and invent wonders that never had been and would never be?

The dragons spoke no speech but the Old Speech. Yet it was always said that dragons lied. Was it so? he wondered. If spellwords were true, how could even a dragon use them to lie?

Seppel and Onyx had come to one of the long, easy, thoughtful pauses in their conversation. Seeing that Onyx was, in fact, at least half asleep, Alder asked the Pelnish wizard softly, “Is it true that dragons can tell untruth in the true words?”

The Pelnishman smiled. “That—so we say on Paln—is the very question Ath asked Orm a thousand years ago, in the ruins of Ontuego. ‘Can a dragon lie?’ the mage asked. And Orm replied, ‘No,’ and then breathed on him, burning him to ashes . . . But are we to believe the story, since it was only Orm who could have told it?”

Infinite are the arguments of mages,
Alder said to himself, but not aloud.

Onyx had gone definitely to sleep, his head tilted back against the bulkhead, his grave, tense face relaxed.

Seppel spoke, his voice even quieter than usual. “Alder, I hope you do not regret what we did at Aurun. I know our friend thinks I did not warn you clearly enough.”

Alder said without hesitation, “I am content.”

Seppel inclined his dark head.

Alder said presently, “I know that we try to keep the Equilibrium. But the Powers of the Earth keep their own account.”

“And theirs is a justice that is hard for men to understand.”

“That’s it. I try to see why it was just that, my craft, I mean, that I must give up to free myself from that dream. What has the one to do with the other?”

Seppel did not answer for a while, and then it was with a question. “It was not by your craft that you came to the wall of stones?”

“Never,” Alder said with certainty. “I had no more power to go there if I willed it than I had to prevent myself from going.”

“So how did you come there?”

“My wife called me, and my heart went to her.”

A longer pause. The wizard said, “Other men have lost beloved wives.”

“So I said to my Lord Sparrowhawk. And he said: that’s true, and yet the bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.”

“Across the wall of stones, no bond endures.”

Alder looked at the wizard, the swarthy, soft, keen-eyed face. “Why is it so?” he said.

“Death is the bond breaker.”

“Then why do the dead not die?”

Seppel stared at him, taken aback.

“I’m sorry,” Alder said. “I misspeak in my ignorance. What I mean is this: death breaks the bond of soul with body, and the body dies. It goes back to the earth. But the spirit must go to that dark place, and wear a semblance of the body, and endure there—for how long? Forever? In the dust and dusk there, without light, or love, or cheer at all? I cannot bear to think of Lily in that place. Why must she be there? Why can she not be—” his voice stumbled—“be free?”

“Because the wind does not blow there,” Seppel said. His look was very strange, his voice harsh. “It was stopped from blowing, by the art of man.”

He continued to stare at Alder but only gradually did he begin to see him. The expression in his eyes and face changed. He looked away, up the beautiful white curve of the foresail, full of the breath of the northwest wind. He glanced back at Alder. “You know as much as I do of this matter, my friend,” he said with almost his usual softness. “But you know it in your body, your blood, in the pulse of your heart. And I know only words. Old words . . . So we had better get to Roke, where maybe the wise men will be able to tell us what we need to know. Or if they cannot, the dragons will, perhaps. Or maybe it will be you who shows us the way.”