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Farther west than west beyond the land my people are dancing on the other wind —The Song of the Woman of Kemay
He came forward, a short, straight-backed man, grey hair tied back from a handsome, timeworn face. He looked to be seventy or so. Old scars, four white seams, ran from his left cheekbone down to the jaw. His gaze was clear, direct, intense. “They’re ripe,” he said, “though they’ll be even better tomorrow.” He held out his handful of little yellow plums. “Lord Sparrowhawk,” the stranger said huskily. “Archmage.” The old man gave a curt nod of acknowledgment. “Come into the shade,” he said.
Eeeeep!
“So maybe the difference isn’t language. Maybe it’s this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do.
“We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We’re yoked, and they’re free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom . . .
“The world’s vast and strange, Hara, but no vaster and no stranger than our minds are. Think of that sometimes.”
“You are my friend, I have no other friend, I will shed my blood for you.” Ridiculous as it was, Tenar knew it was true.
Indeed he did not know what weighed more heavily after all, the great strange things or the small common ones.
“I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”
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“Before long, I think, Mother . . .” “I know.” “I don’t want to leave you.” “You have to leave me.” “I know.” They sat on in the glimmering darkness of the Grove, silent. “Look,” Tehanu murmured. A shooting star crossed the sky, a quick, slow-fading trail of light.
Azver spoke into the silence that followed the question. “Once when my lord the Archmage was here with me in the Grove, he said to me he had spent his life learning how to choose to do what he had no choice but to do.”
He grinned a little as he thought it; for he had always liked that pause, that fearful pause, the moment before things changed.
“My lady, I saw Tehanu. She flies golden on the other wind.” Tenar glanced up at him. His face was white and worn, but there was a shadow of glory in his eyes. She struggled and then said, speaking roughly and almost inaudibly, “Whole?” He nodded. She stroked Alder’s hand, the mender’s hand, fine, skillful. Tears came into her eyes.
Tenar is gray-haired, and Ged a man of seventy. I was writing my main characters through my own life and their lives, and they were long, rich lives. I am grateful to my readers for living those lives with them.
I knew partly what I wanted it to say; not till it was said did I know fully.
I don’t and won’t attempt to explain what it says. I’ve been asked a thousand times to say what a story “means,” and every time I’ve grown surer that so long as I’ve told the story rightly, finding its meaning, or a meaning, is rightly up to its readers.
it came where it was going all along—and yet it goes on past that, being not a closed circle but a spiral, like the orbit of our Earth. Lives end, lives go on, a story ends, others go on.
