Earthsea
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA (1968)
THE TOMBS OF ATUAN (1971)
THE FARTHEST SHORE (1972)
TEHANU THE LAST BOOK OF EARTHSEA (1990)
The island world of Earthsea is inhabited by human beings and by dragons. The dragons are aloof and dangerous creatures, whose native tongue is the Language of the Making. Some events and stories (in Tehanu) suggest that there was a time when dragons and human beings were all one kind, but they have long been divided and unfriendly. Among the human beings, magic is a gift with which some people are born, but which must also be learned as an art or science. Essential to the practice of magic is learning at least some words of the Language of the Making, in which things are given their true names. By learning the true name, the witch or wizard gains power over the thing or the person. Power, of course, may be used for good or for ill.
A Wizard of Earthsea opens on Gont Island. Ged, a young peasant boy with a great gift of magic, goes to the School for Wizards on Roke Island. There, attempting to prove his superiority to another boy, he brings a shadow-being from the realm of the dead into the world of the living. This shadow hunts him through the islands, driving him always toward danger and evil. At last, guided by his old teacher Ogion, he turns on it, and pursues it on a desperate course that leads him out of the world across the barrier of death. There Ged and his shadow, confronting each other, find that they are one; and thus Ged’s being is healed and made whole.
The Tombs of Atuan is set on one of the four islands of the Kargish people, whose language and customs are different from those of the Archipelagans. A child named Tenar is taken from her parents, renamed Arha, “the Eaten One,” and trained as the High Priestess of the Tombs, an ancient desert sanctuary in Atuan, where only women and eunuchs may come. When she is near the end of her training, she comes upon a stranger, a man, in the underground Labyrinth, the heart of the sacred place. This is Ged, now a powerful wizard, seeking the missing half of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, on which is engraved the broken Rune of Peace. The young priestess’s duty is to kill him. Talking with her prisoner, she begins to see that she herself is a prisoner in the Tombs, bound by a meaningless and cruel ritual. Ged gives her back her true name, Tenar. As he has freed her, she frees him: she leads him out of the Labyrinth, and the two escape with the reunited Ring of Peace. Tenar is honored in Havnor, the City of the Kings of Earthsea, but Ged will take her to live and study with his old master Ogion, on Gont.
In The Farthest Shore, Ged, now Archmage of Roke and the most powerful man in the Archipelago, goes with young Arren, Prince of Enlad, on a quest to find why magic seems to be losing its power. After strange adventures far in the south, they are led to the dragons’ islands; and on Selidor, the westernmost of them all, their quest takes them into the realm of death, the dry land of darkness. There they find the wizard Cob, who, desiring immortality for himself, has breached the wall between life and death. Ged takes Cob’s power from him and closes the wound in the world, but it takes all his own power to do so. Arren, who will inherit the throne of Earthsea, empty for five centuries, leads him back into life. The dragon Kalessin carries them both to Roke, where Ged salutes Arren as king; then Kalessin bears him home to Gont Island.
Tehanu, though written seventeen years after The Farthest Shore, takes up the story where it ended. Tenar of the Tombs did not stay with Ogion but married a farmer, Flint, had two children, and has lived these thirty years as a farm woman. Dying, Ogion sends for her. She stays on at the old mage’s house after his death. With her is her adopted daughter. This girl, Therru, who was raped and burned and left for dead by the men who traveled with her mother, is a silent child full of fear and uncomprehended power. The dragon brings Ged to Gont. Worn out and ill, having lost all his powers of magic, Ged is full of shame, and hides even from Arren, who comes seeking him. Aspen, a disciple of Cob, brews evil magic on Gont; Handy, one of the men who abused the child Therru, keeps hanging around. The young king takes Tenar back to her husband’s farm. There Handy and the others try to get at Tenar and the child; Ged comes in time to help her fight them off. That winter Ged stays with Tenar at the farm, and though he has lost his power as a mage, he finds at last his power as a sexual human being. In the spring, Aspen lures Ged and Tenar back to Ogion’s house, and since they cannot work magic they have no defense against him. He humiliates and is about to kill them. Now the disfigured, powerless child Therru finds her true name, Tehanu, and her own power. She summons the dragon Kalessin in the dragons’ speech, the Language of the Making. The dragon destroys Aspen, and greets Therru as a daughter. She will live with Ged and Tenar now, but will live with the dragons later: “I give you my child,” Kalessin says to Ged, “as you will give me yours.”
Dragonfly
URSULA K. LE GUIN
1. Iria
Her father’s ancestors had owned a wide, rich domain on the wide, rich island of Way. Claiming no title or court privilege in the days of the kings, through all the dark years after Maharion fell they held their land and people with firm hands, putting their gains back into the land, upholding some sort of justice, and fighting off petty tyrants. As order and peace returned to the Archipelago under the sway of the wise men of Roke, for a while yet the family and their farms and villages prospered. That prosperity and the beauty of the meadows and upland pastures and oak-crowned hills made the domain a byword, so that people said, “as fat as a cow of Iria,” or, “as lucky as an Irian.” The masters and many tenants of the domain added its name to their own, calling themselves Irian. But though the farmers and shepherds went on from season to season and year to year and generation to generation as solid and steady as the oaks, the family that owned the land altered with time and chance.
A quarrel between brothers over their inheritance divided them. One heir mismanaged his estate through greed, the other through foolishness. One had a daughter who married a merchant and tried to run her estate from the city, the other had a son whose sons quarreled again, redividing the divided land. By the time the girl called Dragonfly was born, the domain of Iria, though still one of the loveliest regions of hill and field and meadow in all Earthsea, was a battleground of feuds and litigations. Farmlands went to weeds, farmsteads went unroofed, milking sheds stood unused, and shepherds followed their flocks over the mountain to better pastures. The old house that had been the center of the domain was half in ruins on its hill among the oaks.
Its owner was one of four men who called themselves Master of Iria. The other three called him Master of Old Iria. He spent his youth and what remained of his inheritance in law courts and the anterooms of the Lords of Way in Shelieth, trying to prove his right to the whole domain as it had been a hundred years ago. He came back unsuccessful and embittered and spent his age drinking the hard red wine from his last vineyard and walking his boundaries with a troop of ill-treated, underfed dogs to keep interlopers off his land.
He had married while he was in Shelieth, a woman no one at Iria knew anything about, for she came from some other island, it was said, somewhere in the west, and she never came to Iria, for she died in childbirth there in the city. When he came home he had a three-year-old daughter with him. He turned her over to the housekeeper and forgot about her. When he was drunk sometimes he remembered her. If he could find her, he made her stand by his chair or sit on his knees and listen to all the wrongs that had been done to him and to the house of Iria. He cursed and cried and drank and made her drink, too, pledging to honor her inheritance and be true to Iria. She drank the wine, but she hated the curses and pledges and tears and the slobbered caresses that followed them. She escaped, if she could, and went down to the dogs and the horses and the cattle, and swore to them that she would be loyal to her mother, whom nobody knew or honored or was true to, except herself.
When she was thirteen the old vineyarder and the housekeeper, who were all that was left of the household, told the Master that it was time his daughter ha
d her naming day. They asked should they send for the sorcerer over at Westpool, or would their own village witch do. The Master of Iria fell into a screaming rage. “A village witch? A hex-hag to give Irian’s daughter her true name? Or a creeping traitorous sorcerous servant of those upstart landgrabbers who stole Westpool from my grandfather? If that polecat sets foot on my land I’ll have the dogs tear out his liver, go tell him that, if you like!” And so on. Old Daisy went back to her kitchen and old Coney went back to his vines, and thirteen-year-old Dragonfly ran out of the house and down the hill to the village, hurling her father’s curses at the dogs, who, crazy with excitement at his shouting, barked and bayed and rushed after her. “Get back, you black-hearted bitch!” she yelled. “Home, you crawling traitor!” And the dogs fell silent and went sidling back to the house with their tails down.
Dragonfly found the village witch taking maggots out of an infected cut on a sheep’s rump. The witch’s use-name was Rose, like a great many women of Way and other islands of the Hardic Archipelago. People who have a secret name that holds their power the way a diamond holds light may well like their public name to be ordinary, common, like other people’s names.
Rose was muttering a rote spell, but it was her hands and her little short sharp knife that did most of the work. The ewe bore the digging knife patiently, her opaque, amber, slotted eyes gazing into silence; only she stamped her small left front foot now and then, and sighed. Dragonfly peered close at Rose’s work. Rose brought out a maggot, dropped it, spat on it, and probed again. The girl leaned up against the ewe, and the ewe leaned against the girl, giving and receiving comfort. Rose extracted, dropped, and spat on the last maggot, and said, “Just hand me that bucket now.” She bathed the sore with salt water. The ewe sighed deeply and suddenly walked out of the yard, heading for home. She had had enough of medicine. “Bucky!” Rose shouted. A grubby child appeared from under a bush where he had been asleep and trailed after the ewe, of whom he was nominally in charge although she was older, larger, better fed, and probably wiser than he was.
“They said you should give me my name,” said Dragonfly. “Father fell to raging. So that’s that.”
The witch said nothing. She knew the girl was right. Once the Master of Iria said he would or would not allow a thing he never changed his mind, priding himself on his intransigeance, since only weak men said a thing and then unsaid it.
“Why can’t I give myself my own true name?” Dragonfly asked, while Rose washed the knife and her hands in the salt water.
“Can’t be done.”
“Why not? Why does it have to be a witch or a sorcerer? What do you do?”
“Well,” Rose said, and dumped out the salt water on the bare dirt of the small front yard of her house, which, like most witches’ houses, stood somewhat apart from the village. “Well,” she said, straightening up and looking about vaguely as if for an answer, or a ewe, or a towel. “You have to know something about the power, see,” she said at last, and looked at Dragonfly with one eye. Her other eye looked a little off to the side. Sometimes Dragonfly thought the cast was in Rose’s left eye, sometimes it seemed to be in her right, but always one eye looked straight and the other watched something just out of sight, around the corner, elsewhere.
“Which power?”
“The one,” Rose said. As suddenly as the ewe had walked off, she went into her house. Dragonfly followed her, but only to the door. Nobody entered a witch’s house uninvited.
“You said I had it,” the girl said into the reeking gloom of the oneroomed hut.
“I said you have a strength in you, a great one,” the witch said from the darkness. “And you know it too. What you are to do I don’t know, nor do you. That’s to find. But there’s no such power as to name yourself.”
“Why not? What’s more yourself than your own true name?”
A long silence.
The witch emerged with a soapstone drop-spindle and a ball of greasy wool. She sat down on the bench beside her door and set the spindle turning. She had spun a yard of greybrown yarn before she answered.
“My name’s myself. True. But what’s a name, then? It’s what another calls me. If there was no other, only me, what would I want a name for?”
“But,” said Dragonfly and stopped, caught by the argument. After a while she said, “So a name has to be a gift?”
Rose nodded.
“Give me my name, Rose,” the girl said.
“Your dad says not.”
“I say to.”
“He’s the Master here.”
“He can keep me poor and stupid and worthless, but he can’t keep me nameless!”
The witch sighed, like the ewe, uneasy and constrained.
“Tonight,” Dragonfly said. “At our spring, under Iria Hill. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.” Her voice was half coaxing, half savage.
“You ought to have your proper name day, your feast and dancing, like any young ’un,” the witch said. “It’s at daybreak a name should be given. And then there ought to be music and feasting and all. Not sneaking about at night and no one knowing … .”
“I’ll know. How do you know what name to say, Rose? Does the water tell you?”
The witch shook her iron-grey head once. “I can’t tell you.” Her “can’t” did not mean “won’t.” Dragonfly waited. “It’s the power, like I said. It comes just so.” Rose stopped her spinning and looked up with one eye at a cloud in the west; the other looked a little northward of the sky. “You’re there in the water, together, you and the child. You take away the child-name. People may go on using that name for a use-name, but it’s not her name, nor ever was. So now she’s not a child, and she has no name. So then you wait. You open your mind up, like. Like opening the doors of a house to the wind. So it comes. Your tongue speaks it, the name. Your breath makes it. You give it to that child, the breath, the name. You can’t think of it. You let it come to you. It must come through you to her it belongs to. That’s the power, the way it works. It’s all like that. It’s not a thing you do. You have to know how to let it do. That’s all the mastery.”
“Mages can do more than that,” the girl said.
“Nobody can do more than that,” said Rose.
Dragonfly rolled her head round on her neck, stretching till the vertebrae cracked, stretching out her long arms and legs restlessly. “Will you?” she said.
Rose nodded once.
They met in the lane under Iria Hill in the dark of night, long after sunset, long before dawn. Rose made a dim glow of werelight so that they could find their way through the marshy ground around the spring without falling in a sinkhole among the reeds. In the cold darkness under a few stars and the black curve of the hill, they stripped and waded into the shallow water, their feet sinking deep in velvet mud. The witch touched the girl’s hand, saying, “I take your name, child. You are no child. You have no name.”
It was utterly still.
In a whisper the witch said, “Woman, be named. You are Irian.”
For a moment longer they held still; then the night wind blew across their naked shoulders, and shivering, they waded out, dried themselves as well as they could, struggled barefoot and wretched through the sharp-edged reeds and tangling roots, and found their way back to the lane. And there Dragonfly spoke in a ragged, raging whisper: “How could you name me that!”
The witch said nothing.
“It isn’t right. It isn’t my true name! I thought my name would make me be me. But this makes it worse. You got it wrong. You’re only a witch. You did it wrong. It’s his name. He can have it. He’s so proud of it, his stupid domain, his stupid grandfather. I don’t want it. I won’t have it. It isn’t me. I still don’t know who I am. I’m not Irian!” She fell silent abruptly, having spoken the name.
The witch still said nothing. They walked along in the darkness side by side. At last, in a placating, frightened voice, Rose said, “It came so …”
“If you ever tell it to anyone I’
ll kill you,” Dragonfly said.
At that, the witch stopped walking. She hissed like a cat. “Tell anyone?”
Dragonfly stopped too. She said after a moment, “I’m sorry. But I feel like—I feel like you betrayed me.”
“I spoke your true name. It’s not what I thought it would be. And I don’t feel easy about it. As if I’d left something unfinished. But it is your name. If it betrays you, then that’s the truth of it.” Rose hesitated and then spoke less angrily, more coldly: “If you want the power to betray me, Irian, I’ll give you that. My name is Etaudis.”
The wind had come up again. They were both shivering, their teeth chattering. They stood face-to-face in the black lane, hardly able to see where the other was. Dragonfly put out her groping hand and met the witch’s hand. They put their arms round each other in a fierce, long embrace. Then they hurried on, the witch to her hut near the village, the heiress of Iria up the hill to her ruinous house, where all the dogs, who had let her go without much fuss, received her back with a clamor and racket of barking that woke everybody for a halfmile round except the Master, sodden drunk by his cold hearth.
2. Ivory
The Master of Iria of Westpool, Birch, didn’t own the old house, but he did own the central and richest lands of the old domain. His father, more interested in vines and orchards than in quarrels with his relatives, had left Birch a thriving property. Birch hired men to manage the farms and wineries and cooperage and cartage and all, while he enjoyed his wealth. He married the timid daughter of the younger brother of the Lord of Wayfirth, and took infinite pleasure in thinking that his daughters were of noble blood. The fashion of the time among the nobility was to have a wizard in their service, a genuine wizard with a staff and a grey cloak, trained on the Isle of the Wise, and so the Master of Iria of Westpool got himself a wizard from Roke. He was surprised how easy it was to get one, if you paid the price.