"You look tired. How far have you come?"
"From Roke."
The old man's expression was hard to read. He said only, "I wouldn't have guessed that."
"I'm from Taon, lord. I went from Taon to Roke. And there the Lord Patterner told me I should come here. To you."
"Why?"
It was a formidable gaze.
"Because you walked across the dark land living…" The stranger's husky voice died away.
The old man picked up the words: "And came to the far shores of the day. Yes. But that was spoken in prophecy of the coming of our King, Lebannen."
"You were with him, lord."
"I was. And he gained his kingdom there. But I left mine there. So don't call me by any title. Hawk, or Sparrowhawk, as you please. And how shall I call you?"
The man murmured his use-name: "Alder."
Food and drink and shade and sitting down had clearly eased him, but he still looked exhausted. He had a weary sadness in him; his face was full of it.
The old man had spoken to him with a hard edge in his voice, but that was gone when he said, "Let's put off talking for a bit. You've sailed near a thousand miles and walked fifteen uphill. And I've got to water the beans and the lettuce is all, since my wife and daughter left the garden in my charge. So rest a while. We can talk in the cool of the evening. Or the cool of the morning. There's seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was."
When he came back by half an hour later his guest was flat on his back asleep in the cool grass under the peach trees.
The man who had been Archmage of Earthsea stopped with a bucket in one hand and a hoe in the other and looked down at the sleeping stranger.
"Alder," he said under his breath. "What's the trouble you bring with you, Alder?"
It seemed to him that if he wanted to know the man's true name he would know it only by thinking, by putting his mind to it, as he might have done when he was a mage.
But he did not know it, and thinking would not give it to him, and he was not a mage.
He knew nothing about this Alder and must wait to be told. "Never trouble, trouble," he told himself, and went on to water the beans.
As soon as the sun's light was cut off by a low rock wall that ran along the top of the cliff near the house, the cool of the shadow roused the sleeper. He sat up with a shiver, then stood up, a bit stiff and bewildered, with grass seed in his hair. Seeing his host filling buckets at the well and lugging them to the garden, he went to help him.
"Three or four more ought to do it," said the ex-Archmage, doling out water to the roots of a row of young cabbages. The smell of wet dirt was pleasant in the dry, warm air. The westering light came golden and broken over the ground.
They sat on a long bench beside the house door to see the sun go down. Sparrowhawk had brought out a bottle and two squat, thick cups of greenish glass. "My wife's son's wine," he said. "From Oak Farm, in Middle Valley. A good year, seven years back." It was a flinty red wine that warmed Alder right through. The sun set in calm clarity. The wind was down. Birds in the orchard trees made a few closing remarks.
Alder had been amazed when he learned from the Master Patterner of Roke that the Archmage Sparrowhawk, that man of legend, who had brought the king home from the realm of death and then flown off on a dragon's back, was still alive. Alive, said the Patterner, and living on his home island, Gont. "I tell you what not many know," the Patterner had said, "for I think you need to know it. And I think you will keep his secret."
"But then he is still Archmage!" Alder had said, with a kind of joy: for it had been a puzzle and concern to all men of the art that the wise men of Roke Island, the school and center of magery in the Archipelago, had not in all the years of King Lebannen's rule named an Archmage to replace Sparrowhawk.
"No," the Patterner had said. "He is not a mage at all."
The Patterner had told him a little of how Sparrowhawk had lost his power, and why; and Alder had had time to ponder it all. But still, here, in the presence of this man who had spoken with dragons, and brought back the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, and crossed the kingdom of the dead, and ruled the Archipelago before the king, all those stories and songs were in his mind. Even as he saw him old, content with his garden, with no power in him or about him but that of a soul made by a long life of thought and action, he still saw a great mage. And so it troubled him considerably that Sparrow-hawk had a wife.
A wife, a daughter, a stepson… Mages had no family. A common sorcerer like Alder might marry or might not, but the men of true power were celibate. Alder could imagine this man riding a dragon, that was easy enough, but to think of him as a husband and father was another matter. He couldn't manage it. He tried. He asked, "Your—wife—She's with her son, then?"
Sparrowhawk came back from far away. His eyes had been on the western gulfs. "No," he said. "She's in Havnor. With the king."
After a while, coming all the way back, he added, "She went there with our daughter just after the Long Dance. Lebannen sent for them, to take counsel. Maybe on the same matter that brings you here to me. We'll see… But the truth is, I'm tired this evening, and not much disposed to weighing heavy matters. And you look tired too. So a bowl of soup, maybe, and another glass of wine, and sleep? And we'll talk in the morning."
"All with pleasure, lord," Alder said, "but for the sleep. That's what I fear."
It took the old man a while to register this, but then he said, "You fear to sleep?"
"Dreams."
"Ah." A keen glance from the dark eyes under eyebrows grown tangled and half grey. "You had a good nap there in the grass, I think."
"The sweetest sleep I've had since I left Roke Island. I'm grateful to you for that boon, lord. Maybe it will return tonight. But if not, I struggle with my dream, and cry out, and wake, and am a burden to anyone near me. I'll sleep outside, if you permit."
Sparrowhawk nodded. "It'll be a pleasant night," he said.
It was a pleasant night, cool, the sea wind mild from the south, the stars of summer whitening all the sky except where the broad, dark summit of the mountain loomed. Alder put down the pallet and sheepskin his host gave him, in the grass where he had slept before.
Sparrowhawk lay in the little western alcove of the house. He had slept there as a boy, when it was Ogion's house and he was Ogion's prentice in wizardry. Tehanu had slept there these last fifteen years, since she had been his daughter. With her and Tenar gone, when he lay in his and Tenar's bed in the dark back corner of the single room he felt his solitude, so he had taken to sleeping in the alcove. He liked the narrow cot built out from the thick house wall of timbers, right under the window. He slept well there. But this night he did not.
Before midnight, wakened by a cry, voices outside, he leapt up and went to the door. It was only Alder struggling with nightmare, amid sleepy protests from the henhouse. Alder shouted in the thick voice of dream and then woke, starting up in panic and distress. He begged his host's pardon and said he would sit up a while under the stars. Sparrowhawk went back to bed. He was not wakened again by Alder, but he had a bad dream of his own.
He was standing by a wall of stone near the top of a long hillside of dry grey grass that ran down from dimness into the dark. He knew he had been there before, had stood there before, but he did not know when, or what place it was. Someone was standing on the other side of the wall, the downhill side, not far away. He could not see the face, only that it was a tall man, cloaked. He knew that he knew him. The man spoke to him, using his true name. He said, "You will soon be here, Ged."
Cold to the bone, he sat up, staring to see the space of the house about him, to draw its reality around him like a blanket. He looked out the window at the stars. The cold came into his heart then. They were not the stars of summer, beloved, familiar, the Cart, the Falcon, the Dancers, the Heart of the Swan. They were other stars, the small, still stars of the dry land, that never rise or set. He had known their names, once, when he knew the names of things.