The Other Wind (27 page)

Ged said nothing, till, after a while: “Look there, Tenar.”

She looked where he was looking, into the dim gulf of air above the western sea.

“If she comes, she’ll come from there,” he said. “And if she doesn’t come, she is there.”

She nodded. “I know.” Her eyes were full of tears. “Lebannen sang me a song, on the ship, when we were going back to Havnor.” She could not sing; she whispered the words. “
O my joy, be free
. . .”

He looked away, up at the forests, at the mountain, the darkening heights.

“Tell me,” she said, “tell me what you did while I was gone.”

“Kept the house.”

“Did you walk in the forest?”

“Not yet,” he said.

H
ERE AT LAST, FOR THE
first time, is Earthsea, in English, all together in the right order. I’m most grateful to all the publishers and editors involved for working together to bring to being this unified edition, where people can see at last that it all really is one story.

The six books of Earthsea were published over thirty-one years, by four different hardcover publishers, and in various paperback editions. It still gets called a trilogy here, though it hasn’t been one since 1990, and in England one publisher calls it a quartet, and another reversed the order of the fifth and sixth books as if it didn’t matter.

I think of the books not as a trilogy or a sextet, a series or a cycle, but simply as Earthsea. If we must have technicalities, and if fantasy must occur in threes, could we call it the Earthsea Trilogies, in the plural? That at least acknowledges the difference between the first three books and the last three.

By market definition, the first three are “young adult” novels, the last three aren’t. YA, however, like most marketing categories, really defines nothing but books written specifically to fit it. YA stories have adolescent protagonists—so, is
Romeo and Juliet
a YA? Should
Huckleberry Finn
be read only by people Huck’s age?— I wrote
A Wizard of Earthsea
to meet the publisher’s request for a book for younger readers. And I gave the next two books a central character who is a genuine, authentic young adult: Ged is still only nineteen at the end of
A Wizard,
and Tenar and Arren are probably not even that old at the end of their books.

But in the
Tombs
Ged is at least thirty, and middle-aged in
Farthest Shore.
And with
Tehanu
I broke altogether from such constraints of category. I said to myself,
People who like fantasy read fantasy, no matter what age either the readers or the characters are.
Nine-year-olds read
The Lord of the Rings,
eighty-nine-year-olds reread
Alice in Wonderland.
I want to follow my characters out of adolescence into their whole lives, and I trust my readers to follow them with me.

So in
Tehanu
there are no adolescents at all. Therru is a little girl, Tenar a middle-aged woman, Ged a middle-aged man. Then came the
Tales,
all about people of extremely various ages. Finally in
The Other Wind,
no principal character is under twenty except the Princess Seserakh, while Tenar is gray-haired, and Ged a man of seventy. I was writing my main characters through my own life and their lives, and they were long, rich lives. I am grateful to my readers for living those lives with them.

***

I
AM ALSO GRATEFUL FOR
having been able to write this book, or as I would prefer to put it, for the gift of this story. Such a gift is always a mystery to a writer. In some ways the story itself remains mysterious to me.

I can see now its theme coming together from elements of all the previous books, joining forces and playing out in a way I could never have foreseen when I started
A Wizard of Earthsea.
Even when I started
The Other Wind,
all I knew certainly was that the increasing imbalance in the practice of wizardry was caused by a profound error, made long ago; and that not only Cob in
The Farthest Shore
but Thorion of Roke embodied this misunderstanding of the uses of power, the desire for control, and the nature of death. This was my great theme. To find its resolution I had to play it through. I did so. I knew partly what I wanted it to say; not till it was said did I know fully.

I don’t and won’t attempt to explain what it says. I’ve been asked a thousand times to say what a story “means,” and every time I’ve grown surer that so long as I’ve told the story rightly, finding its meaning, or a meaning, is rightly up to its readers.

To take me through this end game, I needed not only my protagonists from the other books but new characters. Alder, Seppel, Seserakh, each came forward when their moment appeared—Alder, indeed, on the first page. The one who most surprised me was Seserakh. I was never sure what she was going to say or do next. I didn’t even know what she looked like till she burst out of her red tent and hurled herself at Tenar. New winds were certainly blowing in Earthsea, and this one blew in very fresh from the east, to the king’s consternation, and my delight.

Without her, without Ged, who sends Alder to Havnor, without each one of those who meet on Roke Island on that climactic night, none of them could come to the wall of stones that lies between life and death. They could not set the prisoners of false darkness free.

I have, believe me, learned never to call any book “the last.” But I want to tell the kind people who write me asking for another Earthsea story that so far as I know, the story I had to tell ends here. With Tenar and Ged, on Gont.

It has come round to and past where it began so long ago. In that dark night on Roke and the great sunrise in the other world, it came where it was going all along—and yet it goes on past that, being not a closed circle but a spiral, like the orbit of our Earth. Lives end, lives go on, a story ends, others go on. I know the reign of King Lebannen and Queen Seserakh will be long remembered both in the Archipelago and the Kargad Lands. I think Roke will change, and maybe magic itself will change. I’m not sure if the dragons will ever return out of the west beyond the west, yet I know Tehanu will. I know where Ged goes next.

But the storyteller doesn’t tell all she knows. When the story is over she falls silent. Then, after a while, perhaps she says, “But listen now! I have another tale to tell! Once upon a time, on the western shore of the world, lived people who could work strange spells . . .”

U
RSULA
K. L
E
G
UIN
is one of the most distinguished fantasy and science fiction writers of all time. She has won numerous awards for her work, including the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the National Book Award, and the Newbery Honor. She lives in Portland, Oregon. Visit her online at
ursulakleguin.com
.