The Tombs of Atuan (Earthsea Cycle, #2)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

The tune was on three notes only, and the word that was repeated over and over was a word so old it had lost its meaning, like a signpost still standing when the road is gone. Over and over they chanted the empty word.

“It is not fitting that you be seen climbing and running with other girls. You are Arha.” She stood sullen and did not reply. “It is better that you do only what is needful for you to do. You are Arha.” For a moment the girl raised her eyes to Thar’s face, then to Kossil’s, and there was a depth of hate or rage in her look that was terrible to see. But the thin priestess showed no concern; rather she confirmed, leaning forward a little, almost whispering, “You are Arha. There is nothing left. It was all eaten.” “It was all eaten,” the girl repeated, as she had repeated daily, all the days of her life since she was six.

Her boredom rose so strong in her sometimes that it felt like terror: it took her by the throat.

Time did not mean very much, here in the desert land, under the unchanging Stones, leading a life that had been led in the same way since the beginning of the world. She was not accustomed to thinking about things changing, old ways dying and new ones arising. She did not find it comfortable to look at things in that light.

“But the Godking, and his people, are neglecting the worship of the Tombs. No one comes.” “Well, he sends prisoners here to sacrifice. He doesn’t neglect that. Nor the gifts due to the Nameless Ones.”

“Well, and you’re mistress of all that,” he said. “The silence, and the dark.”

She had not realized how very different people were, how differently they saw life. She felt as if she had looked up and suddenly seen a whole new planet hanging huge and populous right outside the window, an entirely strange world, one in which the gods did not matter.

Most things grow old and perish, as the centuries go on and on. Very few are the precious things that remain precious, or the tales that are still told.”

Kossil had no true worship in her heart of the Nameless Ones or of the gods. She held nothing sacred but power.

It doesn’t matter if there’s oceans and dragons and white towers and all that, because you’ll never see them again, you’ll never even see the light of the sun. All I know is the dark, the night underground. And that’s all there really is. That’s all there is to know, in the end. The silence, and the dark. You know everything, wizard. But I know one thing—the one true thing!”

“I’ll bring food and water when I can. There won’t be much. Water enough, but not much food for a while; I’m getting hungry, do you see? But enough to stay alive on. I may not be able to come back for a day or two days, perhaps even longer. I must get Kossil off the track. But I will come. I promise. Here’s the flask. Hoard it, I can’t come back soon. But I will come back.” He raised his face to her. His expression was strange. “Take care, Tenar,” he said.

“They are old,” Kossil’s voice said, not loud, a whistling thread of sound out of the depths of the cowl. “They are old. Their worship is forgotten, save in this one place. Their power is gone. They are only shadows. They have no power anymore. Do not try to frighten me, Eaten One. You are the First Priestess; does that not mean also that you are the last?… You cannot trick me. I see into your heart. The darkness hides nothing from me. Take care, Arha!”

Who am I? she asked herself, and got no answer.

“Tenar—” “I am not Tenar. I am not Arha. The gods are dead, the gods are dead.”

This is a most terrible place. One man alone has no hope, here. I was dying of thirst when you gave me water, yet it was not the water alone that saved me. It was the strength of the hands that gave it.”

“Did you truly think them dead? You know better in your heart. They do not die. They are dark and undying, and they hate the light: the brief, bright light of our mortality. They are immortal, but they are not gods. They never were. They are not worth the worship of any human soul.”

“What have they ever given you, Tenar?” “Nothing,” she whispered. “They have nothing to give. They have no power of making. All their power is to darken and destroy. They cannot leave this place; they are this place; and it should be left to them. They should not be denied nor forgotten, but neither should they be worshiped.

The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel.

The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes. And where men worship these things and abase themselves before them, there evil breeds; there places are made in the world where darkness gathers, places given over wholly to the Ones whom we call Nameless, the ancient and holy Powers of the Earth before the Light, the powers of the dark, of ruin, of madness…. I think they drove your priestess Kossil mad a long time ago; I think she has prowled these caverns as she prowls the labyrinth of her own self, and now she cannot see the daylight anymore. She tells you that the Nameless Ones are dead; only ...

“You must make a choice. Either you must leave me, lock the door, go up to your altars and give me to your Masters; then go to the Priestess Kossil and make your peace with her—and that is the end of the story—or, you must unlock the door, and go out of it, with me. Leave the Tombs, leave Atuan, and come with me oversea. And that is the beginning of the story. You must be Arha, or you must be Tenar. You cannot be both.”

“If I leave the service of the Dark Ones, they will kill me. If I leave this place I will die.” “You will not die. Arha will die.”

“To be reborn one must die, Tenar. It is not so hard as it looks from the other side.”

“There,” he said, and picking up the Ring of Erreth-Akbe he slid it over the fingers of her right hand, narrowly over the breadth of the hand, and up onto the wrist. “There!” and he regarded it with satisfaction. “It fits. It must be a woman’s arm-ring, or a child’s.”

thought of… taking you to the door. Letting you go.” “That was a choice you didn’t have. You could keep me a slave, and be a slave; or set me free, and come free with me. Come, little one, take courage, turn the key.”

her mind, which was as dark, as shaken as the subterranean vault, “Forgive me. O my Masters, O unnamed ones, most ancient ones, forgive me, forgive me!” There was no answer. There had never been an answer.

Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

Under the trees ran a stream, narrow but powerful, shouting, muscular over its rocks and falls, too hasty to freeze.

“I see your magic is not good only for large things.” “Hospitality,” he said, “kindness to a stranger, that’s a very large thing.

So they lay miserably on the sand, which seemed so soft between the fingers and was rock-hard to the tired body.

He was as far beyond her as the sea. Where was he now, on what way of the spirit did he walk? She could never follow him. He had made her follow him. He had called her by her name, and she had come crouching to his hand, as the little wild desert rabbit had come to him out of the dark. And now that he had the ring, now that the Tombs were in ruin and their priestess forsworn forever, now he didn’t need her, and went away where she could not follow. He would not stay with her. He had fooled her, and would leave her desolate.

She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.

What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward toward the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

She’s a wise crafty boat, my Lookfar. You can trust her.”

All her life she had looked into the dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went on out beyond the stars. No earthly Powers moved it. It had been before light, and would be after. It had been before life, and would be after. It went on beyond evil.

You were the vessel of evil. The evil is poured out. It is done. It is buried in its own tomb. You were never made for cruelty and darkness; you were made to hold light, as a lamp burning holds and gives its light.

I could leave him, then, ready to set off on his brilliant career. That’s where many books about young people stop, after all. Most novels about falling in love don’t tell about the marriage, and most novels about growing up don’t tell about the grown-up.

THE REASON PEOPLE DON’T BELIEVE that I didn’t plan a trilogy from the start is that fantasy now suffers from endemic trilogitis (or the even more serious form of the disease, incurable seriesism).

The women warriors of current fantasy epics—ruthless swordswomen with no domestic or sexual responsibility who gallop about slaughtering baddies—to me they look less like women than like boys in women’s bodies in men’s armor.

Be that as it may, when I wrote the book, it took more imagination than I had to create a girl character who, offered great power, could accept it as her right and due. Such a situation didn’t then seem plausible to me. But since I was writing about the people who in most societies have not been given much power—women—it seemed perfectly plausible to place my heroine in a situation that led her to question the nature and value of power itself.

The word power has two different meanings. There is power to: strength, gift, skill, art, the mastery of a craft, the authority of knowledge. And there is power over: rule, dominion, supremacy, might, mastery of slaves, authority over others....

She is only able to escape when Ged becomes her prisoner. She, for the first time, exerts her power to—her freedom of choice. She chooses to let him live. So she gives herself the chance to see that, if she can free him, she can free herself.

It was the first book I wrote with a woman as the true central character. Tenar’s character and the events of the story came from deep within me, so deep that the subterranean and labyrinthine imagery, and a certain volcanic quality, are hardly to be wondered at.