“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?”