The young man, called Ivory, did not actually have his staff and cloak yet; he explained that he was to be made wizard when he went back to Roke. The Masters had sent him out in the world to gain experience, for all the classes in the School cannot give a man the experience he needs to be a wizard. Birch looked a little dubious at this, and Ivory reassured him that his training on Roke had equipped him with every kind of magic that could be needed in Iria of Westpool on Way. To prove it, he made it seem that a herd of deer ran through the dining hall, followed by a flight of swans, who marvellously soared through the south wall and out through the north wall; and lastly a fountain in a silver basin sprang up in the center of the table, and when the Master and his family cautiously imitated their wizard and filled their cups from it and tasted it, it was a sweet golden wine. “Wine of the Andrades,” said the young man with a modest, complacent smile. By then the wife and daughters were entirely won over. And Birch thought the young man was worth his fee, although his own silent preference was for the dry red Fanian of his own vineyards, which got you drunk if you drank enough, while this yellow stuff was just honeywater.
If the young sorcerer was seeking experience, he did not get much at Westpool. Whenever Birch had guests from Kembermouth or from neighboring domains, the herd of deer, the swans, and the fountain of golden wine made their appearance. He also worked up some very pretty fireworks for warm spring evenings. But if the managers of the orchards and vineyards came to the Master to ask if his wizard might put a spell of increase on the pears this year or maybe charm the black rot off the Fanian vines on the south hill, Birch said, “A wizard of Roke doesn’t lower himself to such stuff. Go tell the village sorcerer to earn his keep!” And when the youngest daughter came down with a wasting cough, Birch’s wife dared not trouble the wise young man about it, but sent humbly to Rose of Old Iria, asking her to come in by the back door and maybe make a poultice or sing a chant to bring the girl back to health. Ivory never noticed that the girl was ailing, nor the pear trees, nor the vines. He kept himself to himself, as a man of craft and learning should. He spent his days riding about the countryside on the pretty black mare that his employer had given him for his use when he made it clear that he had not come from Roke to trudge about on foot in the mud and dust of country byways.
On his rides, he sometimes passed an old house on a hill among great oaks. When he turned off the village lane up the hill, a pack of scrawny, evil-mouthed dogs came pelting and bellowing down at him. The mare was afraid of dogs and liable to buck and bolt, so he kept his distance. But he had an eye for beauty, and liked to look at the old house dreaming away in the dappled light of the early summer afternoons.
He asked Birch about the place. “That’s Iria,” Birch said—“Old Iria, I mean to say. I own the house by rights. But after a century of feuds and fights over it, my granddad let the place go to settle the quarrel. Though the Master there would still be quarreling with me if he didn’t keep too drunk to talk. Haven’t seen the old man for years. He had a daughter, I think.”
“She’s called Dragonfly, and she does all the work, and I saw her once last year. She’s tall, and as beautiful as a flowering tree,” said the youngest daughter, Rose, who was busy crowding a lifetime of keen observation into the fourteen years that were all she was going to have for it. She broke off, coughing. Her mother shot an anguished, yearning glance at the wizard. Surely he would hear that cough, this time? He smiled at young Rose, and the mother’s heart lifted. Surely he wouldn’t smile so if Rose’s cough was anything serious?
“Nothing to do with us, that lot at the old place,” Birch said, displeased. The tactful Ivory asked no more. But he wanted to see the girl as beautiful as a flowering tree. He rode past Old Iria regularly. He tried stopping in the village at the foot of the hill to ask questions, but there was nowhere to stop and nobody would answer questions. A wall-eyed witch took one look at him and scuttled into her hut. If he went up to the house he would have to face the pack of hellhounds and probably a drunk old man. But it was worth the chance, he thought; he was bored out of his wits with the dull life at Westpool, and was never slow to take a risk. He rode up the hill till the dogs were yelling around him in a frenzy, snapping at the mare’s legs. She plunged and lashed out her hoofs at them, and he kept her from bolting only by a staying-spell and all the strength in his arms. The dogs were leaping and snapping at his own legs now, and he was about to let the mare have her head when somebody came among the dogs shouting curses and beating them back with a strap. When he got the lathered, gasping mare to stand still, he saw the girl as beautiful as a flowering tree. She was very tall, very sweaty, with big hands and feet and mouth and nose and eyes, and a head of wild dusty hair. She was yelling, “Down! Back to the house, you carrion, you vile sons of bitches!” to the whining, cowering dogs.
Ivory clapped his hand to his right leg. A dog’s tooth had ripped his breeches at the calf, and a trickle of blood came through.
“Is she hurt?” the woman said. “Oh, the traitorous vermin!” She was stroking down the mare’s right foreleg. Her hands came away covered with blood-streaked horse sweat. “There, there,” she said. “The brave girl, the brave heart.” The mare put her head down and shivered all over with relief. “What did you keep her standing there in the middle of the dogs for?” the woman demanded furiously. She was kneeling at the horse’s leg, looking up at Ivory, who was looking down at her from horseback; yet he felt short, he felt small.
She did not wait for an answer. “I’ll walk her up,” she said, standing up, and put out her hand for the reins. Ivory saw that he was supposed to dismount. He did so, asking, “Is it very bad?” and peering at the horse’s leg, seeing only bright, bloody foam.
“Come on then, my love,” the young woman said, not to him. The mare followed her trustfully. They set off up the rough path round the hillside to an old stone and brick stableyard, empty of horses, inhabited only by nesting swallows that swooped about over the roofs calling their quick gossip.
“Keep her quiet,” said the young woman, and left him holding the mare’s reins in this deserted place. She returned after some time lugging a heavy bucket, and set to sponging off the mare’s leg. “Get the saddle off her,” she said, and her tone held the unspoken, impatient, “you fool!” Ivory obeyed, half annoyed by this crude giantess and half intrigued. She did not put him in mind of a flowering tree at all, but she was in fact beautiful, in a large, fierce way. The mare submitted to her absolutely. When she said, “Move your foot!” the mare moved her foot. The woman wiped her down all over, put the saddle blanket back on her, and made sure she was standing in the sun. “She’ll be all right,” she said. “There’s a gash, but if you’ll wash it with warm salt water four or five times a day, it’ll heal clean. I’m sorry.” She said the last honestly, though grudgingly, as if she still wondered how he could have let his mare stand there to be assaulted, and she looked straight at him for the first time. Her eyes were clear orange-brown, like dark topaz or amber. They were strange eyes, right on a level with his own.
“I’m sorry too,” he said, trying to speak carelessly, lightly.
“She’s Irian of Westpool’s mare. You’re the wizard, then?”
He bowed. “Ivory, of Havnor Great Port, at your service. May I—”
She interrupted. “I thought you were from Roke.”
“I am,” he said, his composure regained. She stared at him with those strange eyes, as unreadable as a sheep’s, he thought. Then she burst out: “You lived there? You studied there? Do you know the Archmage?”
“Yes,” he said with a smile. Then he winced and stooped to press his hand against his shin for a moment.
“Are you hurt too?”
“It’s nothing,” he said. In fact, rather to his annoyance, the cut had stopped bleeding. The woman’s gaze returned to his face.
“What is it—what is it like—on Roke?”
Ivory went, limping only very slightly, to an old mounting-block nearby and sa
t down on it. He stretched his leg, nursing the torn place, and looked up at the woman. “It would take a long time to tell you what Roke is like,” he said. “But it would be my pleasure.”
The man’s a wizard, or nearly,” said Rose the witch,”a Roke wizard! You must not ask him questions!” She was more than scandalized, she was frightened.
“He doesn’t mind,” Dragonfly reassured her. “Only he hardly ever really answers.”
“Of course not!”
“Why of course not?”
“Because he’s a wizard! Because you’re a woman, with no art, no knowledge, no learning!”
“You could have taught me! You never would!”
Rose dismissed all she had taught or could teach with a flick of the fingers.
“Well, so I have to learn from him,” said Dragonfly.
“Wizards don’t teach women. You’re besotted.”
“You and Broom trade spells.”
“Broom’s a village sorcerer. This man is a wise man. He learned the High Arts at the Great House on Roke!”
“He told me what it’s like,” Dragonfly said. “You walk up through the town, Thwil Town. There’s a door opening on the street, but it’s shut. It looks like an ordinary door.” The witch listened, unable to resist the lure of secrets revealed and the contagion of passionate desire. “And a man comes when you knock, an ordinary-looking man. And he gives you a test. You have to say a certain word, a password, before he’ll let you in. If you don’t know it, you can never go in. But if he lets you in, then from inside you see that the door is entirely different—it’s made out of horn, with a tree carved on it, and the frame is made out of a tooth, one tooth of a dragon that lived long, long before Erreth-Akbe, before Morred, before there were people in Earthsea. There were only dragons, to begin with. They found the tooth on Mount Onn, in Havnor, at the center of the world. And the leaves of the tree are carved so thin that the light shines through them, but the door’s so strong that if the Doorkeeper shuts it no spell could ever open it. And then the Doorkeeper takes you down a hall and another hall, till you’re lost and bewildered, and then suddenly you come out under the sky. In the Court of the Fountain, in the very deepest inside of the Great House. And that’s where the Archmage would be, if he was there … .”
“Go on,” the witch murmured.
“That’s all he really told me, yet,” said Dragonfly, coming back to the mild, overcast spring day and the infinite familiarity of the village lane, Rose’s front yard, her own seven milch-ewes grazing on Iria Hill, the bronze crowns of the oaks. “He’s very careful how he talks about the Masters.”
Rose nodded.
“But he told me about some of the students.”
“No harm in that, I suppose.”
“I don’t know,” Dragonfly said. “To hear about the Great House is wonderful, but I thought the people there would be—I don’t know. Of course, they’re mostly just boys when they go there. But I thought they’d be …” She gazed off at the sheep on the hill, her face troubled. “Some of them are really bad and stupid,” she said in a low voice. “They get into the School because they’re rich. And they study there just to get richer. Or to get power.”
“Well, of course they do,” said Rose, “that’s what they’re there for!”
“But power—like you told me about—that isn’t the same as making people do what you want, or pay you—”
“Isn’t it?”
“No!”
“If a word can heal, a word can wound,” the witch said. “If a hand can kill, a hand can cure. It’s a poor cart that goes only one direction.”
“But on Roke, they learn to use power well, not for harm, not for gain.”
“Everything’s for gain some way, I’d say. People have to live. But what do I know? I make my living doing what I know how to do. But I don’t meddle with the great arts, the perilous crafts, like summoning the dead,” and Rose made the hand-sign to avert the danger spoken of.
“Everything’s perilous,” Dragonfly said, gazing now through the sheep, the hill, the trees, into still depths, a colorless, vast emptiness like the clear sky before sunrise.
Rose watched her. She knew she did not know who Irian was or what she might be. A big, strong, awkward, ignorant, innocent, angry woman, yes. But ever since she was a child Rose had seen something more in her, something beyond what she was. And when Irian looked away from the world like that, she seemed to enter that place or time or being beyond herself, utterly beyond Rose’s knowledge. Then Rose feared her, and feared for her.
“You take care,” the witch said, grim. “Everything’s perilous, right enough, and meddling with wizards most of all.”
Through love, respect, and trust, Dragonfly would never disregard a warning from Rose; but she was unable to see Ivory as perilous. She didn’t understand him, but the idea of fearing him, him personally, was not one she could keep in mind. She tried to be respectful, but it was impossible. She thought he was clever and quite handsome, but she didn’t think much about him, except for what he could tell her. He knew what she wanted to know and little by little he told it to her, and then it was not really what she had wanted to know, but she wanted to know more. He was patient with her, and she was grateful to him for his patience, knowing he was much quicker than she. Sometimes he smiled at her ignorance, but he never sneered at it or reproved it. Like the witch, he liked to answer a question with a question; but the answers to Rose’s questions were always something she’d always known, while the answers to his questions were things she had never imagined and found startling, unwelcome, even painful, altering all her beliefs.
Day by day, as they talked in the old stableyard of Iria, where they had fallen into the habit of meeting, she asked him and he told her more, though reluctantly, always partially; he shielded his Masters, she thought, trying to defend the bright image of Roke, until one day he gave in to her insistence and spoke freely at last.
“There are good men there,” he said. “Great and wise the Archmage certainly was. But he’s gone. And the Masters … Some hold aloof, following arcane knowledge, seeking ever more patterns, ever more names, but using their knowledge for nothing. Others hide their ambition under the grey cloak of wisdom. Roke is no longer where power is in Earthsea. That’s the Court in Havnor, now. Roke lives on its great past, defended by a thousand spells against the present day. And inside those spell-walls, what is there? Quarreling ambitions, fear of anything new, fear of young men who challenge the power of the old. And at the center, nothing. An empty courtyard. The Archmage will never return.”
“How do you know?” she whispered.
He looked stern. “The dragon bore him away.”
“You saw it? You saw that?” She clenched her hands, imagining that flight.
After a long time, she came back to the sunlight and the stableyard and her thoughts and puzzles. “But even if he’s gone,” she said, “surely some of the Masters are truly wise?”
When he looked up and spoke it was with a hint of a melancholy smile. “All the mystery and wisdom of the Masters, when it’s out in the daylight, doesn’t amount to so much, you know. Tricks of the trade—wonderful illusions. But people don’t want to believe that. They want the mysteries, the illusions. Who can blame them? There’s so little in most lives that’s beautiful or worthy.”
As if to illustrate what he was saying, he had picked up a bit of brick from the broken pavement, and tossed it up in the air, and as he spoke it fluttered about their heads on delicate blue wings, a butterfly. He put out his finger and the butterfly lighted on it. He shook his finger and the butterfly fell to the ground, a fragment of brick.
“There’s not much worth much in my life,” she said, gazing down at the pavement. “All I know how to do is run the farm, and try to stand up and speak truth. But if I thought it was all tricks and lies even on Roke, I’d hate those men for fooling me, fooling us all. It can’t be lies. Not all of it. The Archmage did go into the labyrinth among the Hoary
Men and come back with the Ring of Peace. He did go into death with the young king, and defeat the spider mage, and come back. We know that on the word of the king himself. Even here, the harpers came to sing that song, and a teller came to tell it … .”
Ivory nodded gravely. “But the Archmage lost all his power in the land of death. Maybe all magery was weakened then.”
“Rose’s spells work as well as ever,” she said stoutly.
Ivory smiled. He said nothing, but she knew how petty the doings of a village witch appeared to him, who had seen great deeds and powers. She sighed and spoke from her heart—“Oh, if only I wasn’t a woman!”
He smiled again. “You’re a beautiful woman,” he said, but plainly, not in the flattering way he had used with her at first, before she showed him she hated it. “Why would you be a man?”
“So I could go to Roke! And see, and learn! Why, why is it only men can go there?”
“So it was ordained by the first Archmage, centuries ago,” said Ivory. “But … I too have wondered.”
“You have?”
“Often. Seeing only boys and men, day after day, in the Great House and all the precincts of the School. Knowing that the townswomen are spell-bound from so much as setting foot on the fields about Roke Knoll. Once in years, perhaps, some great lady is allowed to come briefly into the outer courts … . Why is it so? Are all women incapable of understanding? Or is it that the Masters fear them, fear to be corrupted—No, but fear that to admit women might change the rule they cling to—the … purity of that rule—”
“Women can live chaste as well as men can,” Dragonfly said bluntly. She knew she was blunt and coarse where he was delicate and subtle, but she did not know any other way to be.
“Of course,” he said, his smile growing brilliant. “But witches aren’t always chaste, are they? … Maybe that’s what the Masters are afraid of. Maybe celibacy isn’t as necessary as the Rule of Roke teaches. Maybe it’s not a way of keeping the power pure, but of keeping the power to themselves. Leaving out women, leaving out everybody who won’t agree to turn himself into a eunuch to get that one kind of power … . Who knows? A she-mage! Now that would change everything, all the rules!”