Of the four of them, only the Doorkeeper moved and spoke. He took a step forward, looking from one young man to the next and the next. He said, “You trusted me, giving me your names. Will you trust me now?”
“My lord,” said one of them with a fine, dark face and a wizard’s oaken staff, “we do trust you, and therefore ask you to let the witch go, and peace return.”
Irian stepped forward before the Doorkeeper could answer.
“I am not a witch,” she said. Her voice sounded high, metallic, after the men’s deep voices. “I have no art. No knowledge. I came to learn.”
“We do not teach women here,” said the Windkey. “You know that.”
“I know nothing,” Irian said. She stepped forward again, facing the mage directly. Tell me who I am.”
“Learn your place, woman,” the mage said with cold passion.
“My place,” she said, slowly, the words dragging, “my place is on the hill. Where things are what they are. Tell the dead man I will meet him there.”
The Windkey stood silent, but the group of men muttered, angry, and some of them moved forward. Azver came between her and them, her words releasing him from the paralysis of mind and body that had held him. “Tell Thorion we will meet him on Roke Knoll,” he said. “When he comes, we will be there. Now come with me,” he said to Irian.
The Namer, the Doorkeeper, and the Herbal followed him with her into the Grove. There was a path for them. But when some of the young men started after them, there was no path.
“Come back,” the Windkey said to the men.
They turned back, uncertain. The low sun was still bright on the fields and the roofs of the Great House, but inside the wood it was all shadows.
“Witchery,” they said, “sacrilege, defilement.”
“Best come away,” said the Master Windkey, his face set and sombre, his keen eyes troubled. He set off back to the School, and they straggled after him, arguing and debating in frustration and anger.
They were not far inside the Grove, and still beside the stream, when Irian stopped, turned aside, and crouched down by the enormous, hunching roots of a willow that leaned out over the water. The four mages stood on the path.
“She spoke with the other breath,” Azver said.
The Namer nodded.
“So we must follow her?” the Herbal asked.
This time the Doorkeeper nodded. He smiled faintly and said, “So it would seem.”
“Very well,” said the Herbal, with his patient, troubled look; and he went aside a little, and knelt to look at some small plant or fungus on the forest floor.
Time passed as always in the Grove, not passing at all it seemed, yet gone, the day gone quietly by in a few long breaths, a quivering of leaves, a bird singing far off and another answering it from even farther. Irian stood up slowly. She did not speak, but looked down the path, and then walked down it. The four men followed her.
They came out into the calm, open evening air. The west still held some brightness as they crossed the Thwilburn and walked across the fields to Roke Knoll, which stood up before them in a high dark curve against the sky.
They’re coming,” the Doorkeeper said. Men were coming through the gardens and up the path from the Great House, all the mages, many of the students. Leading them was Thorion the Summoner, tall in his grey cloak, carrying his tall staff of bone-white wood, about which a faint gleam of werelight hovered.
Where the two paths met and joined to wind up to the heights of the Knoll, Thorion stopped and stood waiting for them. Irian strode forward to face him.
“Irian of Way,” the Summoner said in his deep, clear voice, “that there may be peace and order, and for the sake of the balance of all things, I bid you now leave this island. We cannot give you what you ask, and for that we ask your forgiveness. But if you seek to stay here you forfeit forgiveness, and must learn what follows on transgression.”
She stood up, almost as tall as he, and as straight. She said nothing for a minute and then spoke out in a high, harsh voice. “Come up on to the hill, Thorion,” she said.
She left him standing at the waymeet, on the level ground, and walked up the hill path for a little way, a few strides. She turned and looked back down at him. “What keeps you from the hill?” she said.
The air was darkening around them. The west was only a dull red line, the eastern sky was shadowy above the sea.
The Summoner looked up at Irian. Slowly he raised his arms and the white staff in the invocation of a spell, speaking in the tongue that all the wizards and mages of Roke had learned, the language of their art, the Language of the Making: ‘Irian, by your name I summon you and bind you to obey me!”
She hesitated, seeming for a moment to yield, to come to him, and then cried out, “I am not only Irian!”
At that the Summoner ran up towards her, reaching out, lunging at her as if to seize and hold her. They were both on the hill now. She towered above him impossibly, fire breaking forth between them, a flare of red flame in the dusk air, a gleam of red-gold scales, of vast wings - then that was gone, and there was nothing there but the woman standing on the hill path and the tall man bowing down before her, bowing slowly down to earth, and lying on it.
Of them all it was the Herbal, the healer, who was the first to move. He went up the path and knelt down by Thorion. “My lord,” he said, “my friend.”
Under the huddle of the grey cloak his hands found only a huddle of clothes and dry bones and a broken staff.
“This is better, Thorion,” he said, but he was weeping.
The old Namer came forward and said to the woman on the hill, “Who are you?”
“I do not know my other name,” she said. She spoke as he had spoken, as she had spoken to the Summoner, in the Language of the Making, the tongue the dragons speak.
She turned away and began to walk on up the hill.
“Irian,” said Azver the Patterner, “will you come back to us?”
She halted and let him come up to her. “I will, if you call me,” she said.
She reached out and touched his hand. He drew his breath sharply.
“Where will you go?” he said.
“To those who will give me my name. In fire not water. My people.”
“In the west,” he said.
She said, “Beyond the west.”
She turned away from him and them and went on up the hill in the gathering darkness. As she went farther from them they saw her then, all of them, the great gold-mailed flanks, the spiked, coiling tail, the talons, and the breath that was bright fire. On the crest of the Knoll she paused a while, her long head turning to look slowly round the Isle of Roke, gazing longest at the Grove, only a blur of darkness in darkness now. Then with a rattle like the shaking of sheets of brass the wide, vaned wings opened and the dragon sprang up into the air, circled Roke Knoll once, and flew.
A curl of fire, a wisp of smoke drifted down through the dark air.
Azver the Patterner stood with his left hand holding his right hand, which her touch had burnt. He looked down at the men who stood silent at the foot of the hill, staring after the dragon. “Well, my friends,” he said, “what now?”
Only the Doorkeeper answered. He said, “I think we should go to our House, and open its doors.”
A Description of Earthsea
PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES
PEOPLE
THE HARDIC LANDS
The Hardic people of the Archipelago live by farming, herding, fishing, trading, and the usual crafts and arts of a nonindustrial society. Their population is stable and has never overcrowded the limited habitable land available to them. Famine is unknown and poverty seldom acute.
Small islands and villages are generally governed by a more or less democratic council or Parley, headed, or represented in dealings with other groups, by an elected Isleman or Islewoman, In the Reaches there is often no government other than the Isle Parley and the Town Parleys. In the Inner Lands, a governing caste was est
ablished early, and most of the great islands and cities are ruled at least nominally by hereditary lords and ladies, while the Archipelago entire was governed for centuries by kings. Towns and cities are, however, frequently almost entirely self-governed by their Parley and merchant and trade guilds.
The great guilds, since their network covers all the Inner Lands, answer to no overlord or authority except the King in Havnor.
Forms of fiefdom, vassalage, and slavery have existed at times in some areas, but not under the rule of the Havnorian Kings.
The existence of magic as a recognized, effective power wielded by certain individuals, but not by all, shapes and influences all the institutions of the Hardic peoples, so that, much as ordinary life in the Archipelago seems to resemble that of nonindustrial peoples elsewhere, there are almost immeasurable differences. One of these differences may be, or may be indicated by, the lack of any kind of institutionalised religion. Superstition is as common as it is anywhere, but there are no gods, no cults, no formal worship of any kind. Ritual occurs only in traditional offerings at the sites of the Old Powers, in the great, universally celebrated annual festivals such as Sunreturn and the Long Dance, in the speaking and singing of the traditional songs and epics at these festivals, and, perhaps, in the performance of spells of magic.
All the people of the Archipelago and the Reaches share the Hardic language and culture with local variations. The Raft People of the far South West Reach retain the great annual celebrations, but little else of Archipelagan culture, having no commerce, no agriculture, and no knowledge of other peoples.
Most people of the Archipelago have brown or red-brown skin, black straight hair, and dark eyes; the predominant body type is short, slender, small-boned, but fairly muscular and well-fleshed. In the East and South Reaches people tend to be taller, heavier boned, and darker. Many Southerners have very dark brown skin. Most Archipelagan men have little or no facial hair.
The people of Osskil, Rogma, and Borth are lighter-skinned than others in the Archipelago, and often have brown or even blond hair and light eyes; the men are often bearded. Their language and some of their beliefs are closer to Kargish than to Hardic. These far Northerners probably descend from Kargs who, after settling the four great Eastern lands, sailed back to the West about two thousand years ago.
THE KARGAD LANDS
In these four great islands to the northeast of the main Archipelago, the predominant skin color is light brown to white, with hair dark to fair, and eyes dark to blue or grey.
Not much mixing of the Kargish and Archipelagan skin-color types has taken place except on Osskil, since the North Reach is isolated and thinly populated, and the Kargad people have held themselves apart from and often in enmity towards the Archipelagans for two or three millennia.
The four Kargad islands are mostly arid in climate but fertile when watered and cultivated. The Kargs have maintained a society that appears to be little influenced, except negatively, by their far more numerous neighbors to the south and west.
Among the Kargs the power of magic appears to be very rare as a native gift, perhaps because it was neglected or actively suppressed by their society and government. Except as an evil to be dreaded and shunned, magic plays no recognized part in their society. This inability or refusal to practice magic puts the Kargs at a disadvantage with the Archipelagans in almost every respect, which may explain why they have generally held themselves aloof from trade or any kind of interchange, other than piratical raids and invasions of the nearer islands of the South Reach and around the Gontish Sea.
DRAGONS
Songs and stories indicate that dragons existed before any other living creature. The Old Hardic kennings or euphemisms for the word dragon are Firstborn, Eldest, Elder Children. (The words for the firstborn child of a family in Osskilian, akhad, and in Kargish, gadda, are derived from the word haath, “dragon,” in the Old Speech.)
Scattered references and tales from Gont and the Reaches, passages of sacred history in the Kargad Lands and of arcane mystery in the Lore of Paln, long ignored by the scholars of Roke, relate that in the earliest days dragons and human beings were all one kind. Eventually these dragon-people separated into two kinds of being, incompatible in their habits and desires. Perhaps a long geographical separation caused a gradual natural divergence, a differentiation of species. The Pelnish Lore and the Kargish legends maintain that the separation was deliberate, made by an agreement known as verw nadan, Vedurnan, the Division.
These legends are best preserved in Hur-at-Hur, the easternmost of the Kargad Lands, where dragons have degenerated into animals without high intelligence. Yet it is in Hur-at-Hur that people keep the most vivid conviction of the original kinship of human and dragon kind. And with these tales of ancient times come stories of recent days about dragons who take human form, humans who take dragon form, beings who are in fact both human and dragon.
However the Division came about, from the beginning of historical time human beings have lived in the main Archipelago and the Kargad Lands east of it, while the dragons kept to the westernmost isles-and beyond. People have puzzled at their choosing the empty sea for their domain, since dragons are “creatures of wind and fire,” who drown if plunged under the sea. But they have no need to touch down either on water or on earth; they live on the wing, aloft in air, sunlight, starlight. The only use a dragon has for the ground is some kind of rocky place where it can lay its eggs and rear the drakelets. The small, barren islets of the farthest West Reach suffice for this.
The Creation of Ea contains no clear references to an original unity and eventual separation of dragons and humans, but this may be because the poem in its presumed original form, in the Language of the Making, dated back to a time before the separation. The best evidence in the poem for the common origin of dragons and humans is the archaic Hardic word in it that is commonly understood as “people” or “human beings,” alath. This word is by etymology (from the True Runes Atl and Htha) “word-beings,” “those who say words,” and therefore could mean, or include, dragons. Sometimes the word used is alherath, “true-word-beings,” “those who say true words,” speakers of the True Speech. This could mean human wizards, or dragons, or both. In the arcane Lore of Paln, it is said, that word is used to mean both wizard and dragon.
Dragons are born knowing the True Speech, or, as Ged put it, “the dragon and the speech of the dragon are one.” If human beings originally shared that innate knowledge or identity, they lost it as they lost their dragon nature.
LANGUAGES
The Old Speech, or Language of the Making, with which Segoy created the islands of Earthsea at the beginning of time, is presumably an infinite language, as it names all things.
This language is innate to dragons, not to humans, as said above. There are exceptions. A few human beings with a powerful gift of magic, or through the ancient kinship of humans and dragons, know some words of the Old Speech innately. But the very great majority of people must learn the Old Speech. Hardic practitioners of the art magic learn it from their teachers. Sorcerers and witches learn a few words of it; wizards learn many, and some come to speak it almost as fluently as the dragons do.
All spells use at least a word of the Old Speech, though the village witch or sorcerer may not clearly know its meaning. Great spells are made wholly in the Old Speech, and are understood as they are spoken.
The Hardic language of the Archipelago, the Osskili tongue of Osskil, and the Kargish tongue, are all remote descendants of the Old Speech. None of these languages serves for the making of spells of magic.
The people of the Archipelago speak Hardic. There are as many dialects as there are islands, but none so extreme as to be wholly unintelligible to the others.
Osskili, spoken in Osskil and two islands northwest of it, has more affinities to Kargish than to Hardic. Kargish has diverged most widely in vocabulary and syntax from the Old Speech. Most of its speakers (like most Hardic speakers) do not realise that their language
s have a common ancestry. Archipelagan scholars are aware of it, but most Kargs would deny it, since they have confused Hardic with the Old Speech, in which spells are cast, and thus fear and despise all Archipelagan speech as malevolent sorcery.
WRITING
Writing is said to have been invented by the Rune Masters, the first great wizards of the Archipelago, perhaps to aid in retaining the Old Speech. The dragons have no writing.
There are two entirely different kinds of writing in Earthsea: the True Runes and runic writing.
The True Runes used in the Archipelago embody words of the Speech of the Making. True Runes are not symbols only, but reifactors: they can be used to bring a thing or condition into being or bring about an event. To write such a rune is to act. The power of the action varies with the circumstances. Most of the True Runes are found only in ancient texts and lore-books, and used only by wizards trained in their use; but a good many of them, such as the symbol written on the door lintel to protect a house from fire, are in common use, familiar to unlearned people.
Long after the invention of the True Runes, a related but nonmagical runic writing was developed for the Hardic language. This writing does not affect reality any more than any writing does; that is to say, indirectly, but considerably.
It is said that Segoy first wrote the True Runes in fire on the wind, so that they are coeval with the Language of the Making. But this may not be so, since the dragons do not use them, and if they recognise them, do not admit it.
Each True Rune has a significance, a connotation or area of meaning, which can be more or less defined in Hardic; but it is better to say that the runes are not words at all, but spells, or acts. Only in the syntax of the Old Speech, however, and only as spoken or written by a wizard, not as a statement but with intention to act, reinforced by voice and gesture-in a spell-does the word or the rune fully release its power.
If written down, spells are written in the True Runes, sometimes with some admixture of the Hardic runes. To write in the True Runes, as to speak the Old Speech, is to guarantee the truth of what one says-if one is human. Human beings cannot lie in that language. Dragons can; or so the dragons say; and if they are lying, does that not prove that what they say is true?