she was waking, not wanting to waken. faint grey shone at the window in thin slits through the shutters. why was the window shuttered? she got up hurriedly and went down the hail to the kitchen. no one sat by the fire, no one lay on the floor, there was no sign of anyone, anything. except the teapot and three cups on the counter.
therru got up about sunrise, and they breakfasted as usual; clearing up, the girl asked, "what happened?" she lifted a corner of wet linen from the soaking-tub in the pantry. the water in the tub was veined and clouded with brownish red.
"oh, my period came on early," tenar said, startled at the lie as she spoke it.
therru stood a moment motionless, her nostrils flared and her head still, like an animal getting a scent. then she dropped the sheeting back into the water, and went out to feed the chickens.
tenar felt ill; her bones ached. the weather was still cold, and she stayed indoors as much as she could.. she tried to keep therru in, but when the sun came out with a keen, bright wind, therru wanted to be out in it.
"stay with shandy in the orchard," tenar said.
therru said nothing as she slipped out.
the burned and deformed side of her face was made rigid by the destruction of muscles and the thickness of the scar-surface, but as the scars got older and as tenar learned by long usage not to look away from it as deformity but to see it as face, it had expressions of its own. when therru was frightened, the burned and darkened side "closed in," as tenar thought, drawing together, hardening. when she was excited or intent, even the blind eye socket seemed to gaze, and the scars reddened and were hot to touch. now, as she went out, there was a queer look to her, as if her face were not human at all, an animal, some strange horny-skinned wild creature with one bright eye, silent, escaping.
and tenar knew that as she had lied to her for the first time, therru for the first time was going to disobey her. the first but not the last time.
she sat down at the fireside with a weary sigh, and did nothing at all for a while.
a rap at the door: clearbrook and ged-no, hawk she must call him-hawk standing on the doorstep. old clear-brook was full of talk and importance, ged dark and quiet and bulky in his grimy sheepskin coat. "come in," she said. "have some tea. what's the news?"
"tried to get away, down to valmouth, but the men from kahedanan, the bailies, come down and 'twas in cherry's outhouse they found 'em," clearbrook announced, waving his fist.
"he escaped?" horror caught at her.
"the other two," ged said. "not him."
"see, they found the body up in the old shambles on round hill, all beat to pieces like, up in the old shambles there, by kahedanan, so ten, twelve of 'em 'pointed their-selves bailies then and there and come after them. and there was a search all through the villages last night, and this morning before 'twas hardly light they found 'em hiding out in cherry's outhouse. half-froze they was."
"he's dead, then?" she asked, bewildered.
ged had shucked off the heavy coat and was now sitting on the cane-bottom chair by the door to undo his leather gaiters. "he's alive," he said in his quiet voice. "ivy has him. i took him in this morning on the muck-cart. there were people out on the road before daylight, hunting for all three of them. they'd killed a woman, up in the hills."
"what woman?" tenar whispered.
her eyes were on ged's. he nodded slightly. clearbrook wanted the story to be his, and took it up loudly: "i talked with some o' them from up there and they told me they'd all four of 'em been traipsing and camping and vagranting about near kahedanan, and the woman would come into the village to beg, all beat about and burns and bruises all over her. they'd send her in, the men would, see, like that to beg, and then she'd go back to 'em, and she told people if she went back with nothing they'd beat her more, so they said why go back? but if she didn't they'd come after her, she said, see, and she'd always go with 'em. but then they finally went too far and beat her to death, and they took and left her body in the old shambles there where there's still some o' the stink left, you know, maybe thinking that was hiding what they done. and they came away then, down here, just last night. and why didn't you shout and call last night, goha? hawk says they was right here, sneaking about the house, when he come on em. i surely would have heard, or shandy would, her ears might be sharper than mine. did you tell her yet?"
tenar shook her head.
"i'll just go tell her," said the old man, delighted to be first with the news, and he clumped off across the yard. he turned back halfway. "never would have picked you as useful with a pitchfork!" he shouted to ged, and slapped his thigh, laughing, and went on.
ged slipped off the heavy gaiters, took off his muddy shoes and set them on the doorstep, and came over to the fire in his stocking feet. trousers and jerkin and shirt of homespun wool: a gontish goatherd, with a canny face, a hawk nose, and clear, dark eyes.
"there'll be people out soon," he said. "to tell you all about it, and hear what happened here again. they've got the two that ran off shut up now in a wine cellar with no wine in it, and fifteen or twenty men guarding them, and twenty or thirty boys trying to get a peek he yawned, shook his shoulders and arms to loosen them, and with a glance at tenar asked permission to sit down at the fire.
she gestured to the hearthseat. "you must be worn out, she whispered.
"i slept a little, here, last night. couldn't stay awake." he yawned again. he looked up at her, gauging, seeing how she was.
"it was therru's mother," she said. her voice would not go above a whisper.
he nodded. he sat leaning forward a bit, his arms on his knees, as flint had used to sit, gazing into the fire. they were very alike and entirely unlike, as unlike as a buried stone and a soaring bird. her heart ached, and her bones ached, and her mind was bewildered among foreboding and grief and remembered fear and a troubled lightness.
"the witch has got our man," he said. "tied down in case he feels lively, with the holes in him stuffed full of spiderwebs and blood-stanching spells. she says he'll live to hang."
"to hang."
"it's up to the king's courts of law, now that they're meeting again. hanged or set to slave-labor."
she shook her head, frowning.
"you wouldn't just let him go, tenar," ' he said gently, watching her.
"no."
"they must be punished," he said, still watching her.
"punished." that's what he said. punish the child. she's bad. she must be punished. punish me, for taking her. for being-' ' she struggled to speak. "i don't want punishment! - it should not have happened. - i wish you'd killed him!"
"i did my best," ged said.
after a good while she laughed, rather shakily. "you certainly did."
"think how easy it would have been," he said, looking into the coals again, "when i was a wizard. i could have set a binding spell on them, up there on the road, before they knew it. i could have marched them right down to valmouth like a flock of sheep. or last night, here, think of the fireworks i could have set off! they'd never have known what hit them."
"they still don't," she said.
he glanced at her. there was in his eye the faintest, irrepressible gleam of triumph.
"no," he said. "they don't."
"useful with a pitchfork," she murmured.
he yawned enormously.
"why don't you go in and get some sleep? the second room down the hall. unless you want to entertain company. i see lark and daisy coming, and some of the children." she had got up, hearing voices, to look out the window.
"i'll do that," he said, and slipped away.
lark and her husband, daisy the blacksmith's wife, and other friends from the village came by all day long to tell and be told all, as ged had said. she found that their company revived her, carried her away from the constant presence of last night's terror, little by little, till she could begin to look back on it as something that had happened, not something that was happening, that must always be happening to her.
that was also what therru had to learn to do, she thought, but not with one night: with her life.
she said to lark when the others had gone, "what makes me rage at myself is how stupid i was."
"i did tell you you ought to keep the house locked."
"no-maybe-that's just it. ' '
"i know,' ' said lark.
"but i meant, when they were here-i could have run out and fetched shandy and clearbrook-maybe i could have taken therru, or i could have gone to the lean-to and got the pitchfork myself. or the apple-pruner. it's seven feet long with a blade like a razor; i keep it the way flint kept it. why didn't i do that? why didn't i do something? why did i just lock myself in-when it wasn't any good trying to? if he- if hawk hadn't been here- all i did was trap myself and therru. i did finally go to the door with the butcher knife, and i shouted at them. i was half crazy. but that wouldn't have scared them off."
"i don't know," lark said. "it was crazy, but maybe . . . i don't know. what could you do but lock the doors? but it's like we're all our lives locking the doors. it's the house we live in."
they looked around at the stone walls, the stone floors, the stone chimney, the sunny window of the kitchen of oak farm, farmer flint's house.
"that girl, that woman they murdered," lark said, looking shrewdly at tenar. "she was the same one." tenar nodded.
"one of them told me she was pregnant. four, five months along."
they were both silent.
"trapped," tenar said.
lark sat back, her hands on the skirt on her heavy thighs, her back straight, her handsome face set. "fear," she said. "what are we so afraid of? why do we let 'em tell us we're afraid? what is it they're afraid of? ' ' she picked up the stocking she had been darning, turned it in her hands, was silent awhile; finally she said, "what are they afraid of us for?"
tenar spun and did not answer.
therru came running in, and lark greeted her: "there's my honey! come give me a hug, my honey girl!"
therru hugged her hastily. "who are the men they caught?" she demanded in her hoarse, toneless voice, looking from lark to tenar.
tenar stopped her wheel. she spoke slowly.
"one was handy. one was a man called shag. the one that was hurt is called hake." she kept her eyes on therru's face; she saw the fire, the scar reddening. "the woman they killed was called senny, i think."
"senini,' ' the child whispered.
tenar nodded.
"did they kil lher dead?"
she nodded again.
"tadpole says they were here."
she nodded again.
the child looked around the room, as the women had done; but her look was utterly unacceptant, seeing no walls.
"will you kill them?"
"they may be hanged."
"dead?"
"yes."
therru nodded, half indifferently. she went out again, rejoining lark's children by the wellhouse.
the two women said nothing. they spun and mended, silent, by the fire, in flint's house.
after a long time lark said, "what's become of the fellow, the shepherd, that followed 'em here? hawk, you said he's called?"
"he's asleep in there,' ' said tenar, nodding to the back of the house.
"ah," said lark.
the wheel purred. "i knew him before last night."
"ah. up at re albi, did you?"
tenar nodded. the wheel purred.
"to follow those three, and take 'em on in the dark with a pitchfork, that took a bit of courage, now. not a young man, is he?"
"no." after a while she went on, "he'd been ill, and needed work. so i sent him over the mountain to tell clear-brook to take him on here. but clearbrook thinks he can still do it all himself, so he sent him up above the springs for the summer herding. he was coming back from that."
"think you'll keep him on here, then?" '"if he likes," said tenar.
another group came out to oak farm from the village, wanting to hear goha's story and tell her their part in the great capture of the murderers, and look at the pitchfork and compare its four long tines to the three bloody spots on the bandages of the man called hake, and talk it all over again. tenar was glad to see the evening come, and call therru in, and shut the door.
she raised her hand to latch it. she lowered her hand and forced herself to turn from it, leaving it unlocked.
"sparrowhawk's in your room," therru informed her, coming back to the kitchen with eggs from the cool-room.
"i meant to tell you he was here-i'm sorry.
"i know him," therru said, washing her face and hands in the pantry. and when ged came in, heavy-eyed and unkempt, she went straight to him and put up her arms.
"therru," he said, and took her up and held her. she clung to him briefly, then broke free.
"i know the beginning part of the creation," she told him. "will you sing it to me?" again glancing at tenar for permission, he sat down in his place at the hearth.
"i can only say it."
he nodded and waited, his face rather stern. the child said:
the making from the unmaking,
the ending from the beginning,
who shall know surely?
what we know is the doorway between them
that we enter departing.
among all beings ever returning,
the eldest, the doorkeeper, segoy.. . .
the child's voice was like a metal brush drawn across metal, like dry leaves, like the hiss of fire burning. she spoke to the end of the first stanza:
then from the foam bright e`a broke.
ged nodded brief, firm approval. "good," he said.
"last night, " tenar said. "last night she learned it. it seems a year ago."
"i can learn more," said therru.
"you will," ged told her.
"now finish cleaning the squash, please," said tenar, and the child obeyed.
"what shall i do?" ' ged asked. tenar paused, looking at him.
"i need that kettle filled and heated."
he nodded, and took the kettle to the pump. they made and ate their supper and cleared it away. "say the making again as far as you know it," ged said to therru, at the hearth, "and we'll go on from there."
she said the second stanza once with him, once with tenar, once by herself.
"bed," said tenar.
"you didn't tell sparrowhawk about the king."
"you tell him," ' tenar said, amused at this pretext for delay.
therru turned to ged. her face, scarred and whole, seeing and blind, was intent, fiery. "the king came in a ship. he had a sword. he gave me the bone dolphin. his ship was flying, but i was sick, because handy touched me. but the king touched me there and the mark went away. she showed her round, thin arm. tenar stared. she had forgotten the mark.
"some day i want to fly to where he lives," therru told ged. he nodded. "i will do that,' ' she said. "do you know him?"
"yes. i know him. i went on a long journey with him."
"where?"
"to where the sun doesn't rise and the stars don't set. and back from that place."
"did you fly?"
he shook his head. "i can only walk," he said.
the child pondered, and then as if satisfied said, "good night," and went off to her room. tenar followed her; but therru did not want to be sung to sleep. "i can say the making in the dark," she said. "both stanzas."
tenar came back to the kitchen and sat down again across the hearth from ged.
"how she's changing!" she said. "i can't keep up with her. i'm old to be bringing up a child. and she . . . she obeys me, but only because she wants to."
"it's the only justification for obedience," ged observed. "but when she does take it into her head to disobey me, what can i do? there's a wildness in her. sometimes she's my therru, sometimes she's something else, out of reach. i asked ivy if she'd think of training her. beech suggested it. ivy said no. 'why not?' i said. 'i'm afraid of her!' she said. . . . but you're not afraid of her. nor she of you. you and lebannen are the only men she's let touch her. i let that-that handy-i can't talk about it. oh, i'm tired! i don't understand anything
ged laid a knot on the fire to burn small and slow, and they both watched the leap and flutter of the flames.
"i'd like you to stay here, ged," she said. "if you like." he did not answer at once. she said, "maybe you're going on to havnor-"
"no, no. i have nowhere to go. i was looking for work."
"well, there's plenty to be done here. clearbrook won't admit it, but his arthritis has about finished him for anything but gardening. i've been wanting help ever since i came back. i could have told the old blockhead what i thought of him for sending you off up the mountain that way, but it's no use. he wouldn't listen."
"it was a good thing for me," ged said. "it was the time i needed."
"you were herding sheep?"
"goats. right up at the top of the grazings. a boy they had took sick, and serry took me on, sent me up there the first day. they keep 'em up there high and late, so the underwool grows thick. this last month i had the mountain pretty much to myself. serry sent me up that coat and some supplies, and said to keep the herd up as high as i could as long as i could. so i did. it was fine, up there."
"lonely," she said.
he nodded, half smiling.
"you always have been alone."
"yes, i have."
she said nothing. he looked at her.
"i'd like to work here," he said.
"that's settled, then," ' she said. after a while she added, "for the winter, anyway."
the frost was harder tonight. their world was perfectly silent except for the whisper of the fire. the silence was like a presence between them. she lifted her head and looked at him.
"well," she said, "which bed shall i sleep in, ged? the child's, or yours?"
he drew breath. he spoke low. "mine, if you will."
"i will."
the silence held him. she could see the effort he made to break from it. "if you'll be patient with me," he said.
"i have been patient with you for twenty-five years," she said. she looked at him and began to laugh. "come-come on, my dear-better late than never! i'm only an old woman. . . . nothing is wasted, nothing is ever wasted. you taught me that." she stood up, and he stood; she put out her hands, and he took them. they embraced, and their embrace became close. they held each other so fiercely, so dearly, that they stopped knowing anything but each other. it did not matter which bed they meant to sleep in. they lay that night on the hearthstones, and there she taught ged the mystery that the wisest man could not teach him.
he built up the fire once, and fetched the good weaving off the bench. tenar made no objection this time. her cloak and his sheepskin coat were their blankets.
they woke again at dawn. a faint silvery light lay on the dark, half-leafless branches of the oaks outside the window. tenar stretched out full length to feel his warmth against her. after a while she murmured, "he was lying here. hake. right under us." . . .
ged made a small noise of protest.
"now you're a man indeed," she said. "stuck another man full of holes, first, and lain with a woman, second. that's the proper order, i suppose.
"hush," he murmured, turning to her, laying his head on her shoulder. "don't."
"i will, ged. poor man! there's no mercy in me, only justice. i wasn't trained to mercy. love is the only grace i have. oh, ged, don't fear me! you were a man when i first saw you! it's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself."
they lay in warmth and sweet silence.
"tell me something."
he murmured assent sleepily.
"how did you happen to hear what they were saying? hake and handy and the other one. how did you happen to be just there, just then?"
he raised himself up on one elbow so he could look at her face. his own face was so open and vulnerable in its ease and fulfillment and tenderness that she had to reach up and touch his mouth, there where she had kissed it first, months ago, which led to his taking her into his arms again, and the conversation was not continued in words.
there were formalities to be got through. the chief of them was to tell clearbrook and the other tenants of oak farm that she had replaced "the old master" with a hired hand. she did so promptly and bluntly. they could not do anything about it, nor did it entail any threat to them. a widow's tenure of her husband's property was contingent on there being no male heir or claimant. flint's son the seaman was the heir, and flint's widow was merely holding the farm for him. if she died, it would go to clearbrook to hold for the heir; if spark never claimed it, it would go to a distant cousin of flint's in kahedanan. the two couples who did not own the land but held a life interest in the work and profit of the farming, as was common on gont, could not be dislodged by any man the widow took up with, even if she married him; but she feared they might resent her lack of fidelity to flint, whom they had after all known longer than she had. to her relief they made no objections at all. "hawk" had won their approval with one jab of a pitchfork. besides, it was only good sense in a woman to want a man in the house to protect her. if she took him into her bed, well, the appetites of widows were proverbial. and, after all, she was a foreigner.
the attitude of the villagers was much the same. a bit of whispering and sniggering, but little more. it seemed that being respectable was easier than moss thought; or perhaps it was that used goods had little value.
she felt as soiled and diminished by their acceptance as she would have by their disapproval. only lark freed her from shame, by making no judgments at all, and using no words-man, woman, widow, foreigner-in place of what she saw, but simply looking, watching her and hawk with interest, curiosity, envy, and generosity.
because lark did not see hawk through the words herdsman, hired hand, widow's man, but looked at him himself, she saw a good deal that puzzled her. his dignity and simplicity were not greater than that of other men she had known, but were a little different in quality; there was a size to him, she thought, not height or girth, certainly, but soul and mind. she said to ivy, "that man hasn't lived among goats all his life. he knows more about the world than he does about a farm."
"i'd say he's a sorcerer who's been accursed or lost his power some way," the witch said. "it happens."
"ah," said lark.
but the word "archmage" was too great and grand a word to bring from far-off pomps and palaces and fit to the dark-eyed, grey-haired man at oak farm, and she never did that. if she had, she could not have been as comfortable with him as she was. even the idea of his having been a sorcerer made her a bit uneasy, the word getting in the way of the man, until she actually saw him again. he was up in one of the old apple trees in the orchard pruning out deadwood, and he called out a greeting to her as she came to the farm. his name fit him well, she thought, perched up there, and she waved at him, and smiled as she went on.
tenar had not forgotten the question she had asked him on the hearthstones under the sheepskin coat. she asked it again, a few days or months later-time went along very sweet and easy for them in the stone house, on the winterbound farm. "you never told me," ' she said, "how you came to hear them talking on the road."
"i told you, i think. i'd gone aside, hidden, when i heard
"why?"
"i was alone, and knew there were some gangs around."
"yes, of course- but then just as they passed, hake was talking about therru?"
"he said 'oak farm,' i think."
"it's all perfectly possible. it just seems so convenient." knowing she did not disbelieve him, he lay back and waited .
"it's the kind of thing that happens to a wizard," she said.
"and others."
"maybe."
"my dear, you're not trying to . . . reinstate me?"
"no. no, not at all. would that be a sensible thing to do? if you were a wizard, would you be here?"
they were in the big oak-framed bed, well covered with sheepskins and feather-coverlets, for the room had no fireplace and the night was one of hard frost on fallen snow.
"but what i want to know is this. is there something besides what you call power-that comes before it, maybe? or something that power is just one way of using? like this. ogion said of you once that before you'd had any learning or training as a wizard at all, you were a mage. mage-born, he said. so i imagined that, to have power, one must first have room for the power. an emptiness to fill. and the greater the emptiness the more power can fill it. but if the power never was got, or was taken away, or was given away-still that would be there."
"that emptiness," he said.
"emptiness is one word for it. maybe not the right word."
"potentiality?" he said, and shook his head. "what is able to be . . . to become."
"i think you were there on that road, just there just then, because of that-because that is what happens to you. you didn't make it happen. you didn't cause it. it wasn't because of your 'power.' it happened to you. because of your emptiness."
after a while he said, "this isn't far from what i was taught as a boy on roke: that true magery lies in doing only what you must do. but this would go further. not to do, but to be done to. . . .
"i don't think that's quite it. it's more like what true doing rises from. didn't you come and save my life-didn't you run a fork into hake? that was 'doing,' all right, doing what you must do. . . ."
he pondered again, and finally asked her, "is this a wisdom taught you when you were priestess of the tombs?"
"no." she stretched a little, gazing into the darkness. "arha was taught that to be powerful she must sacrifice. sacrifice herself and others. a bargain: give, and so get. and i cannot say that that's untrue. but my soul can't live in that narrow place-this for that, tooth for tooth, death for life. . . . there is a freedom beyond that. beyond payment, retribution, redemption-beyond all the bargains and the balances, there is freedom."
"the doorway between them," he said softly.
that night tenar dreamed. she dreamed that she saw the doorway of the creation of e`a, it was a little window of gnarled, clouded, heavy glass, set low in the west wall of an old house above the sea. the window was locked, it had been bolted shut. she wanted to open it, but there was a word or a key, something she had forgotten, a word, a key, a name, without which she could not open it. she sought for it in rooms of stone that grew smaller and darker till she found that ged was holding her, trying to wake her and comfort her, saying, "it's all right, dear love, it will be all right!" ' '
"i can't get free!" she cried, clinging to him.
he soothed her, stroking her hair; they lay back together, and he whispered, "look."
the old moon had risen. its white brilliance on the fallen snow was reflected into the room, for cold as it was tenar would not have the shutters closed. all the air above them was luminous. they lay in shadow, but it seemed as if the ceiling were a mere veil between them and endless, silver, tranquil depths of light.
it was a winter of heavy snows on gont, and a long winter. the harvest had been a good one. there was food for the animals and people, and not much to do but eat it and stay warm.
therru knew the creation of e`a all through. she spoke the winter carol and the deed of the young king on the day of sunreturn. she knew how to handle a piecrust, how to spin on the wheel, and how to make soap. she knew the name and use of every plant that showed above the snow, and a good deal of other lore, herbal and verbal, that ged had stowed away in his head from his short apprenticeship with ogion and his long years at the school on roke. but he had not taken down the runes or the lore-books from the mantelpiece, nor had he taught the child any word of the language of the making.
he and tenar spoke of this. she told him how she had taught therru the one word, tolk, and then had stopped, for it had not seemed right, though she did not know why.
"i thought perhaps it was because i'd never truly spoken that language, never used it in magery. i thought perhaps she should learn it from a true speaker of it." ' '
"no man is that."
"no woman is half that."
"i meant that only the dragons speak it as their native tongue."
"do they learn it?"
struck by the question, he was slow to answer, evidently calling to mind all he had been told and knew of the dragons. "i don't know," he said at last. "what do we know about them? would they teach as we do, mother to child, elder to younger? or are they like the animals, teaching some things, but born knowing most of what they know? even that we don't know. but my guess would be that the dragon and the speech of the dragon are one. one being."
"and they speak no other tongue."
he nodded. "they do not learn," ' he said. "they are.
therru came through the kitchen. one of her tasks was to keep the kindling box filled, and she was busy at it, bundled up in a cut-down lambskin jacket and cap, trotting back and forth from the woodhouse to the kitchen. she dumped her load in the box by the chimney corner and set off again.
"what is it she sings?" ged asked.
"therru?"
"when she's alone."
"but she never sings. she can't."
"her way of singing. 'farther west than west.' " . . .
"ah!" said tenar. "that story! did ogion never tell you about the woman of kemay?"
"no," he said, "tell me.
she told him the tale as she spun, and the purr and hush of the wheel went along with the words of the story. at the end of it she said, "when the master windkey told me how he'd come looking for 'a woman on gont,' i thought of her. but she'd be dead by now, no doubt. and how would a fisherwoman who was a dragon be an archmage, anyhow!"
"well, the patterner didn't say that a woman on gont was to be archmage,' ' said ged. he was mending a badly torn pair of breeches, sitting up in the window ledge to get what light the dark day afforded. it was a half-month after sunreturn and the coldest time yet.
"what did he say, then?"
"'a woman on gont. ' so you told me."
"but they were asking who was to be the next archmage."
"and got no answer to that question."
"infinite are the arguments of mages," said tenar rather drily.
ged bit the thread off and rolled the unused length around two fingers.
"i learned to quibble a bit, on roke," he admitted. "but this isn't a quibble, i think. 'a woman on gont' can't become archmage. no woman can be archmage. she'd unmake what she became in becoming it. the mages of roke are men-their power is the power of men, their knowledge is the knowledge of men. both manhood and magery are built on one rock: power belongs to men. if women had power, what would men be but women who can't bear children? and what would women be but men who can?"
"hah!" went tenar; and presently, with some cunning, she said, "haven't there been queens? weren't they women of power?"
"a queen's only a she-king," ' said ged.
she snorted.
"i mean, men give her power. they let her use their power. but it isn't hers, is it? it isn't because she's a woman that she's powerful, but despite it."
she nodded. she stretched, sitting back from the spinning wheel. "what is a woman's power, then?" she asked.
"i don't think we know."
"when has a woman power because she's a woman? with her children, i suppose. for a while." . . . ' '
"in her house, maybe."
she looked around the kitchen. "but the doors are shut," she said, "the doors are locked."
"because you're valuable."
"oh, yes. we're precious. so long as we're powerless. . . . i remember when i first learned that! kossil threatened me-me, the one priestess of the tombs. and i realized that i was helpless. i had the honor; but she had the power, from the god-king, the man. oh, it made me angry! and frightened me. . . . lark and i talked about this once. she said, 'why are men afraid of women?'
"if your strength is only the other's weakness, you live in fear," ged said.
"yes; but women seem to fear their own strength, to be afraid of themselves."
"are they ever taught to trust themselves?" ' ged asked, and as he spoke therru came in on her work again. his eyes and tenar's met.
"no," she said. "trust is not what we're taught." she watched the child stack the wood in the box. "if power were trust," she said. "i like that word. if it weren't all these arrangements-one above the other-kings and masters and mages and owners- it all seems so unnecessary. real power, real freedom, would lie in trust, not force."
"as children trust their parents," he said.
they were both silent.
"as things are," he said, "even trust corrupts. the men on roke trust themselves and one another. their power is pure, nothing taints its purity, and so they take that purity for wisdom. they cannot imagine doing wrong.
she looked up at him. he had never spoken about roke thus before, from wholly outside it, free of it.
"maybe they need some women there to point that possibility out to them," she said, and he laughed.
she restarted the wheel. "i still don't see why, if there can be she-kings, there can't be she-archmages."
therru was listening.
"hot snow, dry water," said ged, a gontish saying. "kings are given power by other men. a mage's power is his own--himself. ' '
"and it's a male power. because we don't even know what a woman's power is. all right. i see. but all the same, why can't they find an archmage-a he-archmage?"
ged studied the tattered inseam of the breeches. "well," he said, "if the patterner wasn't answering their question, he was answering one they didn't ask. maybe what they have to do is ask it."
"is it a riddle?" therru asked.
"yes," said tenar. "but we don't know the riddle. we only know the answer to it. the answer is: a woman on gont."
"there's lots of them," therru said after pondering a bit. apparently satisfied by this, she went out for the next load of kindling.
ged watched her go. "all changed," he said. "all . . . sometimes i think, tenar - i wonder if lebannen's kingship is only a beginning. a doorway . . . and he the doorkeeper. not to pass through."
"he seems so young," ' tenar said, tenderly.
"young as morred was when he met the black ships. young as i was when i . . . " he stopped, looking out the window at the grey, frozen fields through the leafless trees.
"or you, tenar, in that dark place . . . what's youth or age?
"i don't know. sometimes i feel as if i'd been alive for a thousand years; sometimes i feel my life's been like a flying swallow seen through the chink of a wall. i have died and been reborn, both in the dry land and here under the sun, more than once. and the making tells us that we have all returned and return forever to the source, and that the source is ceaseless. only in dying, life. . . . i thought about that when i was up with the goats on the mountain, and a day went on forever and yet no time passed before the evening came, and morning again. . . . i learned goat wisdom. so i thought, what is this grief of mine for? what man am i mourning? ged the archmage? why is hawk the goatherd sick with grief and shame for him? what have i done that i should be ashamed?"
"nothing," tenar said. "nothing, ever!"
"oh, yes," said ged. "all the greatness of men is founded on shame, made out of it. so hawk the goatherd wept for ged the archmage. and looked after the goats, also, as well as a boy his age could be expected to do. . . "
after a while tenar smiled. she said, a little shyly, "moss said you were about fifteen."
"that would be about right. ogion named me in the autumn; and the next summer i was off to roke. . . . who was that boy? an emptiness . . . a freedom."
"who is therru, ged?"
he did not answer until she thought he was not going to answer, and then he said, "so made-what freedom is there for her?"
"we are our freedom, then?"
"i think so."
"you seemed, in your power, as free as man can be. but at what cost? what made you free? and i . . . i was made, molded like clay, by the will of the women serving the old powers, or serving the men who made all services and ways and places, i no longer know which. then i went free, with you, for a moment, and with ogion, but it was not my freedom. only it gave me choice; and i chose. i chose to mold myself like clay to the use of a farm and a farmer and our children. i made myself a vessel, i know its shape. but not the clay. life danced me. i know the dances. but i don't know who the dancer is."
"and she," ged said after a long silence, "if she should ever dance. . ." '
"they will fear her," tenar whispered. then the child came back in, and the conversation turned to the bread dough raising in the box by the stove. they talked so, quietly and long, passing from one thing to another and round and back, for half the brief day, often, spinning and sewing their lives together with words, the years and the deeds and the thoughts they had not shared. then again they would be silent, working and thinking and dreaming, and the silent child was with them.
so the winter passed, till lambing season was on them, and the work got very heavy for a while as the days lengthened and grew bright. then the swallows came from the isles under the sun, from the south reach, where the star gobardon shines in the constellation of ending; but all the swallows' talk with one another was about beginning.
