The Tombs of Atuan (Earthsea Cycle, #2)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

“Oh, well, I suppose the Godking will conquer them someday and make them all slaves. But I wish I could see the sea again. There used to be little octopuses in the tide pools, and if you shouted ‘Boo!’ at them they turned all white.—There

She had to talk, she thought, or she would go mad.

In the summer a wasting disease had come upon her; she who had been thin grew skeletal, she who had been grim now did not speak at all. Only to Arha would she talk, sometimes, when they were alone together; then even that ceased, and she went silently into the dark.

The Undertomb, with its great weight of sacredness, was utterly forbidden to any but priestesses and their most trusted eunuchs. Any other, man or woman, who ventured there would certainly be struck dead by the wrath of the Nameless Ones. But among all the rules she had learned, there was no rule forbidding entry to the Labyrinth. There was no need. It could be entered only from the Undertomb; and anyway, do flies need rules to tell them not to enter in a spider’s web?

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.

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.

“Alone, no one wins freedom.

“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.

“All I know is of no use now,” she said, “and I haven’t learned anything else. I will try to learn.”

“Hospitality,” he said, “kindness to a stranger, that’s a very large thing.

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 wept in pain, because she was free. » has to be one of the most crushingly beautiful simple sentences I’ve ever read

Out here, away from the rocky shores, the sea too was silent; only as it touched the boat did it whisper a little.

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.

fantasy now suffers from endemic trilogitis (or the even more serious form of the disease, incurable seriesism).

When I was writing the story in 1969, I knew of no women heroes of heroic fantasy since those in the works of Ariosto and Tasso in the Renaissance. These days there are plenty, though I wonder about some of them. 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.

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. Ged was offered both kinds of power. Tenar was offered only one.