Ogion
She bedded down the child on the cot in the western alcove. She built up the fire. She went and sat down beside Ogion’s pallet, cross-legged on the floor.
“No one looking after you!”
“I sent ‘em off,” he whispered.
His face was as dark and hard as ever, but his hair was thin and white, and the dim lamp made no spark of light in his eyes.
“You could have died alone,” she said, fierce. “Help me do that,” the old man said. “Not yet,” she pleaded, stooping, laying her forehead on his hand.
“Not tonight,” he agreed. “Tomorrow.”
He lifted his hand to stroke her hair once, having that much strength.
She sat up again. The fire had caught. Its light played on the walls and low ceiling and sent shadows to thicken in the corners of the long room.
“If Ged would come,” the old man murmured.
“Have you sent to him?”
“Lost,” Ogion said. “He’s lost. A cloud. A mist over the lands. He went into the west. Carrying the branch of the rowan tree. Into the dark mist. I’ve lost my hawk.”
“No, no, no,” she whispered. “He’ll come back.”
They were silent. The fire’s warmth began to penetrate them both, letting Ogion relax and drift in and out of sleep, letting Tenar find rest pleasant after the long day afoot. She rubbed her feet and her aching shoulders. She had carried Therru part of the last long climb, for the child had begun to gasp with weariness as she tried to keep up.
Tenar got up, heated water, and washed the dust of the road from her. She heated milk, and ate bread she found in Ogion’s larder, and came back to sit by him. While he slept, she sat thinking, watching his face and the firelight and the shadows.
She thought how a girl had sat silent, thinking, in the night, a long time ago and far away, a girl in a windowless room, brought up to know herself only as the one who had been eaten, priestess and servant of the powers of the darkness of the earth. And there had been a woman who would sit up in the peaceful silence of a farmhouse when husband and children slept, to think, to be alone an hour. And there was the widow who had carried a burned child here, who sat by the side of the dying, who waited for a man to return. Like all women, any woman, doing what women do. But it was not by the names of the servant or the wife or the widow that Ogion had called her. Nor had Ged, in the darkness of the Tombs. Nor-longer ago, farther away than all-had her mother, the mother she remembered only as the warmth and lion-color of firelight, the mother who had given her her name.
“I am Tenar,” she whispered. The fire, catching a dry branch of pine, leaped up in a .bright yellow tongue of flame.
Ogion’s breathing became troubled and he struggled for air. She helped him as she could till he found some ease.
They both slept for a while, she drowsing by his dazed and drifting silence, broken by strange words. Once in the deep night he said aloud, as if meeting a friend in the road, “Are you here, then? Have you seen him?” And again, when Tenar roused herself to build up the fire, he began to speak, but this time it seemed he spoke to someone in his memory of years long gone, for he said clearly as a child might, “I tried to help her, but the roof of the house fell down. It fell on them. It was the earthquake.” Tenar listened. She too had seen earthquake. “I tried to help!” said the boy in the old man’s voice, in pain. Then the gasping struggle to breathe began again.
At first light Tenar was wakened by a sound she thought at first was the sea. It was a great rushing of wings. A flock of birds was flying over, low, so many that their wings stormed and the window was darkened by their quick shadows. It seemed they circled the house once and then were gone. They made no call or cry, and she did not know what birds they were.
People came that morning from the village of Re Albi, which Ogion’s house stood apart from to the north. A goatgirl came, and a woman for the milk of Ogion’s goats, and others to ask what they might do for him. Moss, the village witch, fingered the alder stick and the hazel switch by the door and peered in hopefully, but not even she ventured to come in, and Ogion growled from his pallet, “Send ‘em away! Send ‘em all away!”
He seemed stronger and more comfortable. When little Therru woke, he spoke to her in the dry, kind, quiet way Tenar remembered. The child went out to play in the sun, and he said to Tenar, “What is the name you call her?”
He knew the True Language of the Making, but he had never learned any Kargish at all.
“Therru means burning, the flaming of fire,” she said.
“Ah, ah,” he said, and his eyes gleamed, and he frowned. He seemed to grope for words for a moment. “That one,” he said, “That one-they will fear her.”
“They fear her now,” Tenar said bitterly. The mage shook his head.
“Teach her, Tenar,” he whispered. “Teach her all!-Not Roke. They are afraid- Why did I let you go? Why did you go? To bring her here-too late?”
“Be still, be still,” she told him tenderly, for he struggled with words and breath and could find neither. He shook his head, and gasped, “Teach her!” and lay still.
He would not eat, and only drank a little water. In the middle of the day he slept. Waking in the late afternoon, he said, “Now, daughter,” and sat up.
Tenar took his hand, smiling at him.
“Help me get up.
“No, no.
“Yes,” he said. “Outside. I can’t die indoors.”
“Where would you go?”
“Anywhere. But if I could, the forest path,” he said. “The beech above the meadow.”
When she saw he was able to get up and determined to get outdoors, she helped him. Together they got to the door, where he stopped and looked around the one room of his house. In the dark corner to the right of the doorway his tall staff leaned against the wall, shining a little. Tenar reached out to give it to him, but he shook his head. “No,” he said, “not that.” He looked around again as if for something missing, forgotten. “Come on,” he said at last.
When the bright wind from the west blew on his face and he looked out at the high horizon, he said, “That’s good.”
“Let me get some people from the village to make a litter and carry you,” she said. “They’re all waiting to do something for you.”
“I want to walk,” the old man said.
Therru came around the house and watched solemnly as Ogion and Tenar went, step by step, and stopping every five or six steps for Ogion to gasp, across the tangled meadow towards the woods that climbed steep up the mountainside from the inner side of the cliff-top. The sun was hot and the wind cold. It took them a very long time to cross that meadow. Ogion’s face was grey and his legs shook like the grass in the wind when they got at last to the foot of a big young beech tree just inside the forest, a few yards up the beginning of the mountain path. There he sank down between the roots of the tree, his back against its trunk. For a long time he could not move or speak, and his heart, pounding and faltering, shook his body. He nodded finally and whispered, “All right.”
Therru had followed them at a distance. Tenar went to her and held her and talked to her a little. She came back to Ogion. “She’s bringing a rug,” she said.
“Not cold.”
“I’m cold.”
There was the flicker of a smile on her face.
The child came lugging a goat’s-wool blanket. She whispered to Tenar and ran off again.
“Heather will let her help milk the goats, and look after her,” Tenar said to Ogion. “So I can stay here with you.
“Never one thing, for you,” he said in the hoarse whistling whisper that was all the voice he had left.
“No. Always at least two things, and usually more,” she said. “But I am here.”
He nodded.
For a long time he did not speak, but sat back against the
tree trunk, his eyes closed. Watching his face, Tenar saw it change as slowly as the light changed in the west.
He opened his eyes and gazed through a gap in the thickets at the western sky. He seemed to watch something, some act or deed, in that far, clear, golden space of light. He whispered once, hesitant, as if unsure, “The dragon-”
The sun was down, the wind fallen.
Ogion looked at Tenar.
“Over,” he whispered with exultation. “All changed!- Changed, Tenar! Wait-wait here, for-” A shaking took his body, tossing him like the branch of a tree in a great wind. He gasped. His eyes closed and opened, gazing beyond her. He laid his hand on hers; she bent down to him; he spoke his name to her, so that after his death he might be truly known.
He gripped her hand and shut his eyes and began once more the struggle to breathe, until there was no more breath. He lay then like one of the roots of the tree, while the stars came out and shone through the leaves and branches of the forest.
Tenar sat with the dead man in the dusk and dark. A lantern gleamed like a firefly across the meadow. She had laid the woollen blanket across them both, but her hand that held his hand had grown cold, as if it held a stone. She touched her forehead to his hand once more. She stood up, stiff and dizzy, her body feeling strange to her, and went to meet and guide whoever was coming with the light.